


The Fortress of Highever

by howlsmovinglibrary



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Arranged Marriage, Asexuality, Demisexuality, Dragon Age: Origins Quest - The Landsmeet, F/M, Fake Marriage, Friends to Lovers, Marriage of Convenience, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Political Expediency, and there was only one bed, emotional support himbos, fluff from chapter six onwards, idiots to lovers, scary women who are bad at feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 36,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28339035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlsmovinglibrary/pseuds/howlsmovinglibrary
Summary: Ismene Cousland knows that the only way Alistair can win the throne is with her help. But after finally escaping the confines of her noblewoman’s life, is marrying him to guarantee his success at the Landsmeet a sacrifice she’s willing to make?Particularly when she knows that, no matter how she feels, their union will never be anything more than a marriage of political convenience.--Arranged marriage AU, slight canon divergence, an angry Cousland with extreme first world problems.
Relationships: Alistair/Female Cousland (Dragon Age), Alistair/Female Warden (Dragon Age), Alistair/Warden (Dragon Age)
Comments: 99
Kudos: 54





	1. Chapter One

“We think… his claim might be stronger,” Arl Eamon said. “If he… well. If he had the support of a prominent noble family.”

Ismene Cousland kept her mouth shut, staring back at Eamon through her serene noblewoman’s mask. The one that she thought she had left smashed in the dust of her estate in Highever, and which she had been forced to pick back up and put in place upon entrance to Denerim. 

She did not speak. If this man was going to do this to her, he needed to have the balls to say it himself. 

“We… well. If Fergus was here, perhaps his pledge at the Landsmeet would be enough,” Eamon continued. “But Fergus isn’t here… and with no man at the head of your house...”

Ismene blinked at him again, face blank as an unmarked canvas. The silence dragged on, and she let it. She wasn’t about to help Eamon on his way - she wanted every step of this journey to hurt. She would offer him no evidence that would allow him to convince himself that she wanted this. That he wasn’t the villain, forcing two people into something they didn't want to do.

“Anora has no husband, and no heir,” he said, inching closer and closer to the target he wanted her to hit. “It would be… advantageous. If the person laying claim to the throne… had some way to guarantee the bloodline. It would earn a degree of goodwill, from the nobility who remain on the fence.”

_Such a shame we’re both sterile then, isn’t it? You fucking bastard._

“You and Alistair are… close.” By this point, Eamon looked physically uncomfortable, fidgeting in his chair like he had fleas lining his breeches. It gave Ismene an ungodly amount of pleasure. Of the few, scant things she thanked her tutors for, reducing a man to a jellified mess of nerves with a single look was one skill she was always grateful to possess. 

The aim of her tutors had been seduction. Ismene had… improvised.

“You are friends. It really wouldn’t be the greatest imposition, if you were to…”

Ah, yes. Not an imposition, to give up her hand and her body and her home, for the good of the country. Because that’s what she’d been trained to do, was it not - as both a woman and a Warden? Did Eamon truly expect her to be _grateful,_ at the idea of tying herself merely to someone she didn’t detest? It spoke volumes for a woman’s place in the world, that such a thing was considered a boon.

 _I thought I’d left this behind,_ she thought, in the dark, rebellious place in her mind that had, in recent months, been allowed to expand its borders. Now, it was shoved back into a recess, to rant and rail behind a beatific, impassive smile. 

At age thirteen, Ismene Cousland had been paraded in front of King Maric and his seventeen year old son. She’d had no claims to womanhood - still a gawkish array of awkward flat angles that caught on each other clumsily. But its makings within her had been clear. Pale skin. Blue, crystalline stare. Cupid’s bow mouth. Her dark mantle of hair. Barely out of childhood, it had been made clear to her, by her mother, that these tools that she barely knew how to use and frankly baulked at picking up were supposed to secure her a crown.

She’d had one awful, stilted dance with Prince Cailan, in which his breath stank of alcohol she was not yet old enough to drink. And the next day he was engaged to Anora Mac Tir. She’d been barely able to withstand the relief. 

Only, she soon learned that it would’ve perhaps been best, had she actually committed to ensnaring the King. Six years later, he was dead. And that had been six years in which her family continually threw her into the path of a wide variety of men, in the hope she would make an advantageous match. A four year age gap had been a generous starting offer, to say the least.

 _I thought I was free_.

And now she was here again. The irony was not lost on her, that she had another shot at a crown _she did not want_. This time, it was handed to her on a silver platter. Through someone whom she… 

Well. Her mother must be pleading at the Maker’s feet in the afterlife. Kissing the hem of whatever holy robes Ismene imagined He must be wearing.

She had been counting down the days to this conversation. Her tutor in politics had been, of all things, Orlesian - that alone was probably why Loghain had let her whole family be slaughtered. She knew the Grand Game, and she knew the sum of the equation she and Alistair made together was greater than its component parts. Ismene had sensed the familiar makings of the trap begin to close around her ever since encountering the assessing stare of Bann Teagan, when she and Alistair arrived in Redcliffe side-by-side. It was a stare she knew well - it had simply taken her too long to realise that the man had not been thinking about himself.

And now, she stood here like a misbehaving school child under Eamon’s gaze. Once more a pawn, to be moved in small steps, orderly lines, and sacrificed when needed.

She should’ve poisoned Andraste’s ashes when she had the fucking chance. 

No. She couldn't think that. This man was important to Alistair. 

“What I’m saying is,” Eamon said, with exasperation, as if she was the one leading him on a merry chase, and not his own guilt. “Is that with you as his Queen, Alistair would do well. His claim would be legitimised, and no doubt considered all the more beneficial to the country.”

“You want us to announce a formal engagement?” she asked, innocently, smirking inwardly when he winced at the naivety of her pronouncement. “For the sake of appearances at the Landsmeet?”

“I… child.” Eamon sighed, “the nobility would see through such a ploy, if you throw in your lot but do not wager anything against the stakes. I want you to marry him.”

_Fuck you._

Alistair was waiting in her chambers, dithering about with one of the figurines she’d uncovered from a nondescript piece of rubble and handed to him on their journey. It was still odd to see him in civilian clothes, particularly ones so fine. His jawline was becoming more pronounced with the evening's worth of stubble, and his honey warm hair was rumpled all along one side, like he’d been nervously running his hands through it while he waited. He startled and jumped to standing when she entered, his face a picture of guilt. So. As always, she’d been the last person to be consulted on her own nuptials.

“Maker, I’m so so so sorry, Ismene. It really, really wasn’t my idea.”

“I know,” she told him flatly, dropping her cloak from her shoulders with a sigh. Maker, she missed armour already. It was so much easier going through the world as a sexless, metal lump. When the protection was physical, and not a series of imaginative exercises in which she pretended not to notice the way people looked at her.

They’d been in Denerim not yet a week. Eamon’s seamstresses had not achieved forcing her back into dresses, but even shirts and breeches left her feeling vulnerable, aware of how much of her figure was on show. It had changed, over months of fighting darkspawn and delving Deep Roads - it was thickset and muscular now, where once it had been dainty and frustratingly breakable. But even now, when she should’ve felt strong, she pretty much saw ‘childbearing hips’ written in the eyes of everyone whose stare trailed down her body.

The first time Alistair had seen her without armour, he’d looked stunned. Almost like he’d forgotten that his companion was a woman, underneath all the formless chainmail. 

“I told him,” Alistair said, dragging her to the present. “I told him that there’s no way I’d do it, if you didn’t want to. Maker, I’m not even sure I want to be king. Now that he’s got you even more tangled up in his scheming - you know I don’t expect this from you, right? I would never expect this of... of anyone. It… it isn’t fair! It’s far too much to ask of you!”

Something - something that she’d been trying to ice over for months now, to transmute into a dead, leaden rock - fluttered in her chest. But Ismene quickly tamped it down. 

Boiled down to its essentials, what Alistair was actually saying was that he’d done what he always did: absolved himself of any responsibility. Left the big decisions to her. Oh, he didn’t _want_ to marry her, but he would… if he had to. He’d follow her lead, as he had every step of this journey.

He didn’t want her. But he’d settle for her. Not much choice. She was the only Warden left. The only eligible noblewoman, now, too. Or at least, the only one who held a teyrnir.

“I said yes,” she said, busying herself with hanging up her cloak, and then brushing invisible dirt from her shoulders. 

When she looked up, he’d frozen where he stood, hands limp at his sides. Mouth agape.

“It makes sense. It’s… expedient,” she continued lightly, holding his gaze until his jaw abruptly snapped shut. “I want revenge too. When I’m queen, I might not be able to cleave Howe’s head from his shoulders myself, but I suppose there is a certain pleasure in ordering the deed to be done.”

“You… you want to marry me.” Alistair said numbly. “For murder.”

“Why do you want to marry me?” she challenged, “because Eamon asked you nicely?”

He blushed and stuttered, “well… I… I don’t really…”

 _I don’t really want to marry you._ Iz finished the sentence for him in her head.

Well, he’d probably expected the luxury of choice, she supposed. That’s why she was taking this better than him. She’d never even been allowed to even entertain notions of that.

“Don’t worry, Ali,” she interrupted. “I imagine it’ll be pretty much the same as we are now, really. We’re already bound together. Joined. Attached at the hip. Sharing in the mutual joy of darkspawn dreams. A marriage contract is just another obligation, on top of all the ones we already have. And unlike the archdemon, it probably won’t kill us.”

“An… obligation?” he echoed.

“Oh, well, I suppose that’s quite harsh wording. There’s really no need for you to feel burdened by it. I won’t make it difficult or awkward. I imagine the crown will be heavy enough to wear without me exacerbating the issue. I will hardly expect presents. Or canoodling.” She took a breath, before saying, “you can even keep Leliana, if you’d like.”

Alistair frowned. 

“Um, aren’t _you_ the one who technically hired her? I thought she followed you.”

Ahh, so they were still talking around the issue, were they? Ismene didn’t have the energy for directness, so she said. “Well, if there was any reason, _any reason at all_ , for keeping her on, you only need to let me know.”

“...Riiiight,” Alistair said, looking shifty in a way that told her he was definitely still trying to hide the fact he was fucking their friend. “So, you really think we should do this? You think we should… make a bid for the throne? Get married? Rule... together?”

Ismene looked at him. He looked a little lost, a little yearning. Like he wanted a certain answer from her, that certain answer he always expected her to somehow be able to give. What he probably wanted was for her to say no. Then, he could hastily back off out a marriage he didn't want without ever actually having to be cruel enough to directly insult her, something she wasn't sure he was actually capable of doing. He could run to Eamon with his tail between his legs, and blame everything on the Mean Cousland Lady, who had no such qualms. 

Poor Alistair. He was always so hesitant, so uncertain. That first night, when they’d been shell-shocked and reeling from the slaughter at Ostagar, she’d had to practically interrogate him, coaxing his plan that he didn’t think was quite-a-plan out of him. But it had been a plan. A plan that had, until this point, worked. He’d had a great many ideas that formed into brilliant strategies. 

He just needed someone to convince him that they were worth listening to in the first place.

And as she’d watched him throw himself into danger, time and time again, for the sake of the ideal the Wardens represented - that Ismene wasn’t even sure she believed in - she’d begun to realise. Alistair was a fundamentally good person. Not like her, who had pasted her virtuous exterior like a varnish across an angry, bitter girl who relished the taste of other people’s blood in her mouth. He actually believed he could make the world a better place. He actually _wanted_ to be a hero - and he didn't even want to be one for the glory, or the money, or the women. He just wanted to help people. 

She didn’t know how well a man like that would do if placed on a throne - she didn’t think she’d ever seen such a man on one, in her lifetime. But, in that selfish, chaotic way of hers, she wanted to do it, and see. 

“Oh Ali,” she said quietly. “I don’t think we really have a choice.”

The conversation became stilted after that, because there wasn't really anything else to say. Their wedding wasn't theirs to plan, after all - Eamon would take care of everything, according to his vision. As Alistair left the room and she stood there alone, Ismene was hit by another image: the one she’d started building up over the last few months, in those dark, untouchable places in her mind. The two of them, together, in the once abandoned fortress of Soldier’s Peak. Both in sky-blue armour, laughing over meals with the friends she’d found and recruited for him, ruling their own little kingdom of soldiers side-by-side. Fighting together, protecting each other, not needing anything more because that was already so much. A friendship. A blood pact. A life bond.

She tried to add a throne to the image. A crown. But as soon as she took her future-self's sword away, nervousness and nausea bubbled in the back of her throat.

 _It won’t be so different,_ she thought, and she prayed she wasn’t lying to herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey pals! This is a new Origins project, fully drafted, that I'll post over the next few weeks. 
> 
> What you need to know:
> 
> \- No overlap with any of the rest of my work, this is a different world state.  
> \- Yeah, Ismene Cousland is a bit of an "unlikable" female character, please don't tell me in comments bc believe me I know. It's why I stan her so hard.
> 
> Canon-divergence: 
> 
> \- Ferelden is more sexist than canon (although not by much, bc Bioware sucks at writing 'matriarchal' power structures).   
> \- Eleanor Cousland is way less of a feminist icon - I felt bad about doing this bc I love her in the games, but I also didn't want to make Cousland's dad a villain bc I like female-female relationship dynamics too much.  
> \- The biggest canon divergence of all: Alistair is not romanced by Redcliffe. Honestly, not romancing this boi as soon as possible may be an AU in its own right.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!! :) xx


	2. Chapter Two

The moment that Alistair had fallen in love with her was embarrassing, really, which is why he didn’t go around telling too many people about it.

It was in the Deep Roads. They hadn’t seen daylight or a bath in weeks, but the Maker gifted them with one of those things when they came across an underground stream. The water was unnaturally cold in comparison to the unbearable, fleshy heat of the caverns. Which probably meant that it was cursed, or something - but no one had cared by that point. They’d all swigged hungrily from the probably-cursed-water, filled up their canteens, and then stripped off the outer layers of their armour and waded in. Having made it that far underground and so deep behind enemy lines, they were coated in pints of blood, so much that their clothes were dried in a crust and sticking to their skin. They couldn’t have removed them even if they wanted to. Morrigan watched from the sidelines, a familiarly disdainful look on her face. She was dirty, but had stayed out of the frontlines enough that she wasn’t caked in filth.

Alistair had dunked his head under, ribs screaming at the cold, and when he resurfaced, gasping, he saw Ismene, yanking an awful chunk of… something, out of her long, dark hair. It hung in a rope down her back and was wet and sopping, only just beginning to unravel itself against her shoulder. The bun she’d kept it in until this point had all but dried stiff, so it took a moment to recalibrate his mind to the appearance of her with her hair down. The sight left his mouth dry.

She’d caught him watching, and given him a small, reserved grin, the one that created a dimple in her left cheek. Her dark, wet clothes were clinging to her body, gradually becoming less dark as the blood leached out of them.

She held up the black clump, pulling one final strand of hair from it, and said, “it’s a gen… _lock_. Geddit? A gen-lock... of hair.”

He stared at her dumbly. His heart was hammering from more than the ice cold water.

“Alistair. You are really going to have to laugh at my pun. Because otherwise you’ve just witnessed me prise a chunk of darkspawn from my hair, and I just don’t think there’s any way we can recover from that.”

 _Bestill my heart,_ he thought, ironically, and hastily chuckled, though it came out high-pitched in a way he could blame on the glacial current. 

_I just don’t think there’s any way we can recover from that_. If only she knew.

The warrior who’d made her small, stoically paced joke and given him that tiny, sincere smile was a far cry from the impassive stranger who stood next to him at the altar. They barely even wore the same face.

He knew that Ismene had been… distant from him, for over a few months now - for reasons he was aware of with acute, painful clarity. Every chilled, steady-voiced interaction between them had grated like sandpaper ever since. But even that cool detachment was nothing compared to the icy, impartial front she put up now, within Denerim’s city walls. He could practically see the defences she’d built around herself, same as if she'd started walling herself in with physical bricks and mortar. It was _horrible_. He didn’t think her face had betrayed even a hint of real emotion ever since they’d entered Eamon’s estate.

“I hear you tried to lay siege to the Fortress of Highever,” Zevran had announced, one night in camp - _the_ night in camp, when everything had gone tits up and Alistair had decided to pilfer from Oghren’s booze supply and get very, very drunk. He’d clapped Alistair on the back and sunk down next to him, taking the bottle of Golden Scythe from his hands and stealing a deep swig.

“I… what fortress?” They’d been about to enter the Brecilian Forest at the time, and hadn't seen a building in weeks, never mind a castle.

“‘The Fortress of Highever’,” Zevran grinned. “Our lovely, glorious leader.”

“What are you talking about… _you mean Ismene?!_ ” Alistair sputtered, mortified, wondering if _everyone_ had seen his rose get trampled in the dirt. “She’s not a… she’s not a building! I didn’t ‘lay siege’!" He thought about what that might mean, metaphorically, and became even more indignant, "I… I just _asked nicely!_ ”

“All salient points, my friend,” Zevran said, patting his shoulder again with easy camaraderie. “But that’s what our Lady Cousland’s known as, in certain circles. ‘The Unassailable Fortress of Highever’. The Crows actually have a bounty on her maidenhead, you know - out of mere immature sport, of course, no ill will!” he hastily clarified as Alistair’s expression turned stormy, “we have one for the newly devout Prince of Starkheaven, too, you know! Anyone with a reputation for their absurdly straight-laced ways. She has been proposed to by fifteen men, touched by none. So, don’t feel too down! You’ve joined a long, respectably large line of broken hearts, to almost rival my own.”

Looking at Ismene now, in this Chantry, Alistair thought he understood the nickname, even though it still made him angry. In many ways, she was the most beautiful he’d ever seen her - hair washed and brushed to a shimmering, onyx sheen, darkspawn-flesh free, her lips painted with just the lightest stroke of rose pink, and her deep, sapphire blue gown making her eyes all the more heart-shattering. The only mar on her perfection was the fact that the dress dipped lower than anything he’d seen her in for months - not something he was about to complain about, Alistair thought - and it meant that her sun-tanned face and neck with its spattering of freckles contrasted again the milk pale of her decolletage. 

But she also looked… untouchable. Like she was carved from marble. Like if he reached out to take her hand, he’d come up against an invisible wall, and she wouldn’t even glance his way, or notice him trying to break it down.

She wasn’t looking his way now. Her eyes were pinned on the back wall of the Chantry. All he had was her profile.

 _Look at me,_ he willed, desperately. 

She didn’t.

Not until the Mother arrived with Eamon, and it was time to say the vows. 

It was a small ceremony. Izzy had refused to invite their friends. Maker preserve him, she hadn’t even bought her _dog_ , Lady Imelda Snuffles, who was her near constant companion in every given situation. Alistair supposed he could do without Morrigan’s lip curling at the display, but it would’ve been nice for it to feel slightly less clinical and detached, like they were visiting a healer or buying potions from a shop. 

"I swear unto the Maker, and the Holy Andraste, to love this woman the rest of my days." Alistair said, eyes roaming across her face and watching as it remained as calm and unmoved as a lake frozen over in winter. Maker. Holy Andraste. How many times had he imagined… well, not _this_ , because he’d never made it so far as to earn the right to imagine _this_. His imaginings had been far simpler: the idea that he’d tell a joke, and she’d laugh at it. That he’d hold her hand, lace their fingers, and feel her pulse against his. Her head laid gently against his shoulder, just once allowing him to bear the weight she burdened herself with.

He was surprised that, as he spoke the words now, he meant them. Even as his chest hurt at this… facsimile of his wildest fantasies. He was in earnest. It could almost have been a real wedding ceremony.

Except… she wasn’t there with him.

"I swear unto the Maker and the Holy Andraste, to love this man the rest of my days." Ismene recited. Her voice was cool and clipped, devoid of emotion. She didn’t even avoid his gaze - instead she looked straight at him, eyes bluebell-bright as they bore mercilessly down and into his soul. His heart was hammering in his chest. She was… beautiful. She was terrifying. He actually found her more approachable with a greatsword in her hands.

Alistair slipped the plain silver band onto her finger, then glanced at the Chantry Mother. Coward that he was, he was glad to break the stare. “I… do I?” he asked, awkwardly, aware he was gesturing too much with his clammy, sweaty hands.

The Mother nodded, gestured for him to look back towards Ismene. Alistair considered expiring on the spot, to save himself the embarrassment.

Instead, he leant in and kissed her.

It was about as awful as he expected. That is, it was everything he’d ever dreamed of, marred by the single fact that she was unresponsive and unmoving beneath his mouth. Maker’s balls, he’d wanted to do this _properly_ , before. Desperate to kid himself that he’d at least done a good job with his first kiss, he closed his eyes and reached up with one hand, ghosting his fingers across one cheek in a caress and applying the barest, gentlest pressure, cupping her jaw and tilting it ever so slightly. He felt her tense underneath him, almost like she was… affronted. Nothing changed at her end. He stepped back.

The slightest pink flush suffused her cheeks. For the briefest moment, he saw the first flash of emotion in her eyes that he’d seen all week, as she blinked up at him, looking a little dazed. She bit her lip, which - you know - kind of ended him.

And then that unbearable mask slipped back into place. The Fortress’ doors closed once more.

They left the Chantry man and wife. Alistair felt like he should be punching the air. He mostly just felt like punching Eamon. 

Back in Eamon’s office - because yes, nothing said ‘high romance’ like adjourning to a strategy meeting scant hours after one tied the knot - Alistair squirmed in his seat as his guardian said. “Obviously, there is no need to go about producing an heir just yet. But with the contract between you in place, the nobility will know Alistair’s claim is in earnest. The Couslands would never tie themselves to someone with no legitimate claim to the throne.”

“Obviously,” Ismene echoed. This version of her sarcasm came out ice brittle. She’d always been soft spoken and had few words - a bit like Sten, who measured everything he said carefully before saying it (a skill Alistair would never claim to possess). Now, she spoke even less, and used every word like a knife. 

“If you… er… _want_ to share a room, it would obviously be encouraged. Servants do tend to talk to… um. Other servants. At other houses.”

“You’re giving me leave to sleep with my husband?” Ismene asked, bluntly. “Do you want us to tangle the bedsheets each morning, for good measure? Maybe rip a few undergarments and scatter them around the room?”

For the second time that day, Alistair imagined expiring. Death would be a sweet, sweet release from whatever torture this was supposed to be.

“Now, child, there’s no need to be crass. I know that you-”

“Don’t patronise me, Eamon.” Ismene cut him off. “I succeeded where every single one of your knights failed, and you owe me your life. Do not presume to tell me how to live mine, now that you’ve already dictated its course far more than even my own mother managed.”

Alistair had to admit a bit of perverse pleasure at watching Eamon squirm in _his_ seat. He’d never known anyone quite capable of achieving that - well, other than Isolde, and her victory over his guardian hadn’t exactly turned out in Alistair’s favour.

“The main priority is getting Anora out of that house,” Ismene continued, not giving the Arl enough time for a rebuttal.

“...It is?” Alistair squeaked.

“Yes.” Ismene said. “I’m certain that what her maid says is true - she’s being held there against her will.”

“I’m not sure what good having her free will actually serve,” Eamon pointed out.

“The quickest way to the throne is if she abdicates,” Ismene retorted.

“And you really think she would?”

“If I know Anora,” Ismene said, which actually surprised Alistair - he wasn’t aware she’d known Anora at all. “She’ll probably thank us for taking it off her hands.”

“Eamon’s a git, but he’s probably right. We should probably sleep in the same room, to keep up appearances,” Ismene said, in the same tone as if she was discussing the weather. They were walking back through the house, and even as he felt his skin begin to crawl with embarrassment, he was a little grateful she’d been the one to bring it up. He’d already broken out in a cold sweat wondering who’s door he should approach in the guest quarters. “If word gets out that the ‘Fortress of Highever’ has been ‘breached’, the nobility will absolutely know I’m in earnest.”

“I - you - you know about that awful nickname?” Alistair stuttered. That was the best part of that statement for him to focus on - lest his brain and perhaps, embarrassingly, other parts of his anatomy, explode.

“Don’t you like it?” she asked, blandly. “I actually came up with it.”

“You - you - _what?_ ”

“Mother threw me at everything and everyone capable of begetting an heir within a sixty mile radius of our estate,” she informed him. “Even my chaperones were paid extra to look the other way, if I or anyone else wanted to compromise me enough to necessitate a marriage. It was solely my job to rebuff them all. I had to assemble some kind of formidable reputation from the ground up and give them all some misgivings, otherwise they would’ve assumed me easy, and thought they had _carte blanche_ to take liberties. I actually commissioned a bard to write the first song with that title - Zevran knows all the lyrics, if you’re interested. Leliana too, probably.”

 _Ismene. Easy._ Alistair didn’t think he’d ever put those two words in the same sentence. 

“I picked a bard with a talent for hyperbole," she continued. "I think at one point he compares my nethers to a Winter’s Grasp. It breaks the fortress metaphor to smithereens, but it does at least make my frigidity abundantly clear. After that I only got the men who wanted a challenge, and they were the kind that I had an excuse to hurt. Not physically, of course - but their reputations never survived in tact. Between that and the song, everyone thinks I'm a heinous bitch. If they believe I’ve accepted you and you’ve broken down all my defences, they’ll probably give you a crown for that alone."

There was a moment of silence. “Do... do you have to talk about yourself like that?” Alistair finally said. Ismene glanced at him, surprised, and he realised he would have to blunder forward with his point. “It’s like you’re not even talking about yourself. Or about a person at all. It’s like you think you’re... an object. Being broken, or breached, or... otherwise. You’re not… you’re not a _thing_. And frankly I don’t think your ‘frigidity’ should be anyone’s business, or their song material. Not your… your nethers either.”

The corner of her mouth twitched, and he saw the smallest hint of a smile colour her face, making it ten times more human. “That’s sweet, Alistair. And you’re in a position to defend my honour now, and everything.”

“It’s not sweet… and it’s not about honour either! It’s just… common decency!” he said. “I… this… this is bloody ridiculous! We don’t have to sleep together… I mean _sleep_ together. Well, either, really. Forget what looks best or fits… the lie best, or whatever. What do you want to do, Iz?”

Using her nickname was a mistake. He hadn’t called her that in weeks, respecting the distance she wanted to put between them. Immediately the smile faltered and fell away. 

“I think…” she said, carefully, a frown marring her brow before impassivity claimed that as well, “we’ve already slept together, Alistair. We shared that tent when Shale crushed our reserve, and then there was the Deep Roads - I’m pretty sure our bedrolls would’ve been next to each other at some point in that whole venture.”

 _Twenty-one nights, out of thirty-seven._ Alistair could’ve told her. Given that he’d kept count. 

“Doing so in the same room shouldn’t be all that different,” she reasoned, with the logic of someone who clearly didn’t think about Alistair naked even half the amount of time he did her. “It was fine then, it should be fine now. Eamon’s beds are huge.”

“Right,” he said, his voice very far away. 

“It’s basically the same.”

“Yes.”

“And if you…” she looked away, “it’s not like we have to go to bed at the same time either. I sleep like the dead. If you come in late, don’t worry about waking me up.”

“Ok?” he squeaked. That might be best, actually - to wait until she was dead to the world. Or perhaps go to bed so early that he was dead to the world by the time she arrived. He might be able to make it through by pretending he was just sleeping next to a log. Or a piece of furniture.

...A particular curvy piece of furniture. With a heartbeat. Who smelt like pine needles and cinnamon, over an iron under-tang of blood.

She sighed, and looked down at herself, in her beautiful blue gown. “I’m going to go change. See if Zevran is free to train.”

What a wedding night. _My bride choosing to get beaten up by another man rather than spend any time in my company, sexy or otherwise._

He supposed it suited Ismene, though. When she’d arrived in the Grey Warden encampment at Ostagar, he’d been more than a little dubious at Duncan bringing a literal wisp along as their new recruit. Gaunt, high cheekbones, and wrists that looked like they could snap if they held a sword. But since the darkspawn blood of the Joining had rearranged her body, giving her new strength and stamina, he’d never seen someone train so religiously. Even those stuck-up templar trainees who self-righteously believed that the Maker’s light shone solely from their ass didn’t have half her determination or perseverance. She wasn’t strong by nature, but she’d clawed her way there tooth and nail. The first time she’d beaten him in combat, he’d cheered with her, knowing how hard she’d worked for it.

“Maker, I miss you in armour,” he said. Then paused, mortified at the sentence that had just dropped out of his month of its own accord, in its half-wistful tone.

She froze up in place and blinked at him, surprised and confused. “N-not that the dress isn’t lovely of course,” he hastily backtracked, wondering if he’d offended her, “it’s just… it’s not really… _you,_ is it?”

She was outright staring now.

“N-not that you don’t look beautiful right now, or that you don’t suit beauty, or… or… something! The dress is very nice! It matches your eyes! Makes them bluer, even!” he continued, by this point feeling the ground practically sink beneath him as he dug himself a bigger and bigger hole. “It’s - just - I - just - you seem different, in Denerim. Bad... different. On the one hand, glad we’re not waist-deep in darkspawn, anymore - woohoo, lucky us! On the other… you seemed to enjoy yourself more. With the darkspawn. Rather than nobles. I’ll… I’m just going to stop talking now.”

Silence reigned supreme, after that outburst. Alistair wanted to die again, but unfortunately the third time did _not_ prove to be a charm.

“I… miss my armour too,” she said softly, startling him after a few seconds' pause. She looked up at him. “I lov- I really liked being a Warden.”

“You still are one, aren’t you?” he asked, frowning. “Unless Wynne’s got a cure for the Taint that you’re just dying to tell me about?”

“Oh, Alistair,” she sighed, and patted his arm gently before walking away. “You don’t understand.”


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: graphic depictions of violence

A shaft of sunlight pierced through her vision, dispersing the last fading remnants of dreams. Ismene woke up choking on an open mouthed snore, feeling warmth like she hadn’t known in days. Camping in tents had felt like freedom at first, but Maker, did it wear thin pretty quickly. Having duvets and pillows… it was as close to paradise as she thought she could get, these days. She sighed contentedly, and burrowed further in, tugging the covers to her neck. The material of her pillow was soft and skin-warm against her cheek and…

...and rising and falling, with someone else’s breath. Beating, slow and steady, with a heartbeat other than her own.

Her eyes snapped open with an ominous sense of dread. When she’d come back from training with Zevran, every muscle aching because she’d intentionally pushed herself far enough to guarantee unconscious oblivion within five minutes, she’d found Alistair already asleep, tucked into one side of her - their - bed. The side she normally slept on, though she wasn’t about to wake him up to complain. She’d changed quietly, and tucked herself carefully into the other side, perching herself right on the edge of the mattress. If she’d moved in one direction even an inch, she would’ve tipped right off, but that had left a wide expanse in the other direction that…

...apparently she’d covered without difficulty - nay, with some kind of subconscious, single-minded determination - in the night. Ali was on his back, chest rising and falling silently without even a snore, and she was planted on his chest, arm splayed across his waist while her chin rested on his sternum. The thin cotton of his shirt scratched her cheek. He had a warm hand, resting every so lightly, on her back, where she would normally have her breast band.

Oh, Maker. She’d drooled on his fucking shirt. 

_Andraste, if you’ve ever loved me, I am fucking begging you,_ Izzy thought, as she slowly, gently shifted back to her new side of the bed. She prayed she could stealth out of the awkward tangle she had created. She’d had more than enough lessons with Zev. She was wearing a nightshirt and leggings, not armour. She could sneak out of his grasp. 

There was nothing she could do about the drool stain, but hopefully it would dry quickly.

The Maker was kind. Nothing about Alistair’s posture or breathing changed as Iz crept out from under the covers and inched away from the bed. Even when she stubbed her toe on the bedpost after she'd noticed she'd left one of his ankles exposed, and cursed for ten seconds before she remembered herself. 

_Must’ve been tired,_ Ismene thought, gathering a bundle of clothes silently from her dresser, and slinking towards the corridor and the shared guest's bathroom. She spared one glance towards his sleeping face, which seemed tense even in rest: brow slightly furrowed, mouth a carefully neutral line. It didn't surprise her that he'd slept well - she herself hadn’t had a night that darkspawn free in ages. That was the good thing about being a soldier - you taught yourself to latch onto sleep where and when it was offered. While Izzy had spent her youth cursed with insomnia, overthinking every little way her life could go monumentally wrong. Now she simply blacked out at a moment’s notice.

 _Well,_ she thought, stretching out her neck and hearing the bones crackle like tree branches underfoot, _time to go rescue a queen, I suppose._

When she came down to breakfast, damp and freshly washed, she saw Alistair sat, fully dressed, shovelling bacon onto his plate. It surprised her: he’d seemed dead to the world when she’d crept from their chamber. And she hadn’t spent that long washing herself and dressing. The era of leisurely scented baths was truly over for her, in favour of practical dunks in water that was considered luxurious if it wasn’t subzero. 

He was frowning at his meal, like the bacon had mortally offended his honour. 

“You look _so very well-rested_ , Alistair,” Zevran remarked in a strangely gloating tone of voice, as she poured herself a cup of tea and plopped herself down next to Morrigan at the other end of the table. “Is marital bliss everything the stories tell us of?”

“Fuck. off.” Ismene heard Ali growl, making Zevran chuckle.

Maker, she fucking loved armour. Walking through the Howe estate as a nondescript, faceless lump, hair and curves and face hidden behind a silver wall - it was the freest she’d felt in days. 

She wondered what that said about her, that her heart soared as she strode through the corridors of her enemy’s home, sword strapped to her back. This was the man who’d murdered her entire family in cold blood only a year or so ago. She should’ve perhaps felt terrified to face him. Instead, her blood was _singing_.

She glanced back to see Alistair, Zevran, and Morrigan, all in their own uniform suits of armour, indistinguishable apart from their differences in height. Even Morrigan’s terminal aura of disdain - which Izzy had to admit she rather admired - wasn’t obvious, perhaps because she was struggling with the weight of plate mail. Regardless, Ismene knew which one of the three armoured figures was Alistair - because he, as always, had her back. Even had he not been the tallest among them, she would’ve known which was him by the way he perfectly matched his movements to hers, complementing every motion she made as they started checking rooms as quietly as they could. She didn’t need to ask for a lookout, or someone to guard her flank as she peered around corners - he was already there. 

Because that’s what they were. A team.

She remembered what he’d said last night, about missing her in armour. It was like he’d plucked the thought right out of her own head. Sometimes, it felt like they shared one mind and not just one body in battle, the way they moved perfectly in tandem feeling like he was almost an extension of her own will. The first time they’d finished a sentence simultaneously, rebuking one of Daveth’s poor come-ons as they trudged through the blight-ridden shithole that had been the Korcari Wilds, her eyes had gone as wide as dinner plates. She'd choked on her breath, while Ali had simply laughed off the vocal misstep. Alistair had never known her, _before_ , so he didn’t understand that she barely ever spoke to people, never mind agreed with them as closely as she did with him.

Thinking about all the ways they _complemented_ each other had her thinking back to that simple, chaste kiss at the Chantry altar last night. It hadn’t been much, but she was so used to holding herself apart from the world that to her it had felt like _everything_. Had she been any woman other than Ismene Cousland - Ismene Theirin, now, she supposed - that single caress along her cheek might have been enough to make her shudder.

 _Leliana’s been teaching him well_ , came an icy, unpleasant thought at the back of her mind.

And wasn’t that just unworthy of her, and of the bard that waited for them back at the Howe Estate? Here she was, with her tortured inner monologue over chaste, vestigial kisses, while her friend had watched her lover get married without even a word of complaint. Leliana hadn’t even treated her any differently since the announcement, and Ismene had vowed to do the same. She’d never been the type of woman to let any man get between her and another woman’s friendship.

Anora was rather a case and point, in that regard.

“There is magic, up ahead,” Morrigan hissed from inside her helmet. “I sense it - 'tis some form of protective ward.”

“That’s where my mistress is!” Erlina whispered back.

They rounded the corner to find a door, encased in shimmering light that felt cold and hard as steel when Ismene touched it. A glance back at Morrigan - who shook her head. She didn’t seem to have a means of breaking it, short of turning into a massive fucking spider and flailing her limbs at it. Well, maybe that could be Plan B. Erlina stepped closer, and hissed through the door, "the Grey Warden is here, my lady.”

“Iz? Is that you?” came the familiar tart, commanding voice of the woman on the other side. 

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Thank... the... Maker. You know, under other circumstances, I would weep to hear that you survived Ostagar. I would hug you and shower you with kisses. But look! Spell’s in the way! How inconvenient! It seems like my ‘host’ believes that guests don’t only need fifteen guards a piece, but magic now, as well. My father’s overprotectiveness has taken on new dimensions in his old age.”

“Tearful reunions were never really our thing anyway, Goldie,” Ismene grinned behind her helmet.

“Um… am I hearing this right?” Alistair flipped up the front of his helmet and hissed at her side, “this… _is_ Loghain’s daughter, we’re talking to?”

“And you are Marric’s son, are you not?” Ismene whispered back, a little archly. “Would you say you’re like him?”

The day that Anora’s engagement to Cailan had been announced, Ismene’s mother had shouted at her in their guests quarters of the Denerim castle for fumbling the opportunity practically laid out in front of her. Angry beyond measure but unsure what to do with all that emotion, thirteen-year-old Izzy had settled for sobbing in one of the hedgerows of the palace, furiously scouring harsh lines of dirt in the manicured grass with her bare hands. She’d clawed at the earth, dark crescents of soil under her fingernails, only to look up and see a regal looking girl, three years her senior, staring down at her bedraggled, besmudged and snot-drenched state with something approaching bemusement. “This is my space to cry,” Anora Mac Tir had informed her, primly, “would you mind kindly getting your own?”

It had been the start of an unlikely friendship, but one that had weathered even, apparently, Anora’s father actively trying to kill her, multiple times. Ismene couldn’t help but think that cultivating this connection had proven to be a far more adept political gambit - earning her all of the influence of queenship without having to marry the man it was tied to. But her mother had never really seen it that way.

“Did you really get married without me there to be your bridesmaid, you utter whore!” Anora continued, conversationally. “After all those years you denied me a ceremony? All that time, you used me to throw them off your scent, and then you _still_ married a Theirin? I hope it was a love match, at least - I’ve heard that the bastard boy is an utter oaf!”

Alistair’s face became an angry, blotchy red, ears burning, but Ismene placed a placating hand on his arm. “Goodness, my marriage must’ve caused quite a stir, if even those imprisoned in strange men’s bedrooms have already heard about it.” she said, looking at her husband pointedly. That was evidence that their plan was actually working.

“You know, if you wanted aid in the Landsmeet, you could’ve just asked me! I know more about politics than a Chantry school drop-out!”

“Hey!” This time, Ali wasn’t able to keep his indignant retort back.

“...Oh dear. Is that the beloved husband?” Anora’s voice managed to sound a little guilty, although Ismene knew her friend well enough to estimate she probably felt less than half the regret she was pretending to feel.

“Yes, it is, and I know more about politics than the two of you combined,” Ismene replied, blandly. “I was the one here raised by Eleanor Cousland and her bevy of Orlesian tutors. You had a reclusive hermit for a father, who wouldn’t recognise diplomacy _unless_ it beat him over the head with a sword.”

“-You mean the father who _literally betrayed us, murdered Duncan, and left us for dead_?” Alistair growled.

“And your father wouldn’t recognise diplomacy unless Eleanor introduced him to it first,” was Anora's prim retort. Ismene tried and failed to hide a snigger. The past year had been a proper clusterfuck, but Maker, she had missed Anora.

“You sit tight, and I’ll get you out of there, Goldie,” she said. 

“You better,” Anora grumbled, “I heard you were just looking for an excuse to murder Howe, anyway. Say hello to him from me before you decapitate the wretch, or whatever it is you Wardens do.”

The cellar was dark, damp, and smelt unpleasantly like deep mushroom. They were almost certain Howe was close, and had stopped to regroup. Ismene helped Morrigan bandage a wound on her arm, then looked up to find Zevran had snuck back through the labyrinth of dungeon cells and bodies, to rejoin the party. 

“The Dragon Peak’s boy is safely clothed and away,” Zevran informed her. Iz nodded her thanks as she tightened the bandage one last time. Oswyn was a bit of a spoilt prat, who spent more time gambling with his soldiers than fighting with them. But Dragon’s Peak had a record of irrefutable honour, and the alliance that would result from helping get him out alive would pay dividends in the political battle against Loghain.

She could feel displeasure coming off of Alistair in waves. “He’ll be useful to us soon enough,” she told him, without looking up. “Would you rather have left him strapped to a rack? He doesn’t deserve that.”

“Oh, don’t tempt me,” Ali muttered.

Izzy rolled her eyes. Oswyn was a bit of a twit, but she was feeling a lot more charitable towards Bann Sighard’s son, now that there was no pressure to actively marry him as there had been when they were both seventeen. Unfortunately, once the identity of his rescuer had been revealed, Oswyn had taken the rescue and that newfound generosity on Izzy's part as some kind of... extreme demonstration of interest. 

It seemed the fact that Howe had murdered Ismene’s entire family went rather over his head - he’d thought she’d come all the way down here _for him_. While she was pleasantly surprised to find that the heir of Dragon Peak hadn’t been the kind of man who took a female warrior’s rescue as a mar on his honour, she didn’t like the way he’d interpreted it - with all the ego of a man - as a sign of lingering affection from a doomed, childlike first love. And it seemed that the viscera of Howe’s men decorating her knee caps hadn’t done anything to dissuade him of his own ardour.

“I told him we were doing this in the name of the rightful king. You’ll be glad when Sighard speaks up for you at the Landsmeet.”

“Didn’t mention that that rightful king was your husband, though, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t! For one thing, the poor man is having a bad enough day. Let him hold onto his delusions for the next hour, at least. Secondly, he’s an idiot. We want him back with Sighard, singing our praises, before he realises that I’m no longer on the market. Sighard’s loyalty is what we want, but Oswyn’s the tool for claiming it.”

“He was rather dashing, as Fereldans go,” Zevran noted, off-hand. “Rather nice clavicles. A good set of abs.”

Alistair glowered.

“Please, have you seen that nose?” Ismene sighed. “Dragon’s Peak was isolated for several centuries before they joined the other Banns, and I’ll be honest, in Oswyn? It shows.”

“Really? I thought muscled blondes were your type, dear Warden.”

Ismene glared, Alistair sputtered, and Zevran gave an entirely unrepentant grin.

“...I am talking about myself, of course,” the Crow continued innocently, after a beat had passed in painful silence. “I always knew that you saved me in that clearing for nefarious purposes, you wily woman.”

“Are you what we’re calling ‘muscled’, these days?” Ismene replied, curious. “I could’ve become a Warden _so much earlier_.”

Zevran looked delighted at the speed of the riposte. “Who knew that gaining royal status also bestowed a sense of humour. Tell me, Alistair, when will you be inheriting yours?”

“Are we going to stand here gossiping like fishwives, or are we going to kill Howe and get out of this fucking dungeon?” Morrigan asked impatiently. 

“A woman after my own heart,” Ismene grinned, patting her bandaged arm and beginning to advance further down the corridor. 

They advanced on Arl Howe’s chamber. She knew the taint of the Joining only let her sense darkspawn, but Izzy could swear she could feel the man in there, his presence wriggling under her skin. She glanced over at Alistair, and when he met her eyes, she smiled. The kind of bloodthirsty smile she didn’t have to hide around him, because he knew exactly who and what she was. He nodded at her in understanding, an unspoken agreement passing between them.

They were brothers at arms. Her revenge was his revenge as well.

“Well, well, look here,” came the pompous nasal tones of Howe as she hefted the door open. The man that had laid waste to her house watched her, arms crossed, seemingly nonchalant as if he'd been waiting for her to call for tea. “If it isn’t Bryce Cousland’s little spitfire. All grown up, and finally able to prize herself out of the dolly dresses her mother whored her in. All ready to play the man. I thought Loghain had made it clear that your pathetic family is _gone_ and forgotten, little girl.”

Ismene paused at the threshold. Sighed inwardly. She thought she’d be just able to stab Rendon Howe and have done with it, but it seemed that courtly performance and _showmanship_ mattered, even here. She supposed, in a way, that this would provide closure, or at least a good story to tell. 

“You seem to be labouring under some misapprehension,” she informed him, as she squared up, once more taking comfort in her armour. She made her voice as regal as she could manage. “If this was about my family, no doubt I’d be here to thank you.”

Howe looked bemused, but mostly still just entertained. “...Oh?”

Ismene took a step forward. “I wouldn’t be here, now, holding this sword, if it wasn’t for you. You murdered my family, and that was the best thing that could’ve ever happened to me. I got to taste freedom, and blood,” she smiled, ice brittle. “You gave me license to be the monster you see before you.” 

And finally, that was when Howe began to look wrong-footed. 

In reality, it was a half-truth. Izzy had hated her mother, but loved her father dearly. Her niece and her sister-in-law… they hadn't know what to do with her, but they had been good people. And for every noble dead in Highever that night, there was five servants slaughtered: beloved tutors, friends, allies. For their lives alone, she would murder Howe in vengeance, though he would never understand that they were worth more to her than those who bore the Cousland name.

But that didn't matter here. Howe expected either a helpless, sobbing girl lost without her father, or a shrieking harpy playing at vengeance. That was all women were allowed to be, in his eyes - victims, or afterthoughts. Loose ends. But she wasn’t going to be either. She refused.

“Your house is gone. Your parents died on their knees,” he spat, his voice wavering only slightly, but enough for Ismene’s Orlesian tutelage to detect. “Your brother's remains rot in Ostagar, and his brat was burned on the scrapheap along with his Antivan whore of a wife. And what’s left? A fool husk of a daughter, likely to end her days under a rock in the Deep Roads. Even the Wardens are gone. You’re the last of... nothing. This is pointless. You’ve lost.”

Ismene wondered if he rehearsed that speech. Maybe drafted versions of it before bed, after a long day of evil machinations and maniacal cackling. It seemed he had not come prepared to improvise, at the very least.

“You can’t make me fear you, Howe. I’m not here to avenge my family,” she replied. “I don't care how they died. If you murdered them on their knees, or wore their clothing like costumes, or fed them to your dogs. I’m _glad_ I’m alone. Please understand - this isn’t _personal._ ”

“I was your father’s closest friend, and I killed him inside his own house. In his own hall. How can this not be personal?”

“It seems you spend more time thinking over your actions than I ever do. Do you want to have a cry, and maybe talk through your feelings, before I cut your throat? And people say women are emotional.”

“You think your bluster can scare me? When I took your house, you were nothing more than a pathetic little doll, barely able to hold up a sword.”

“I can hold it perfectly well now,” Ismene replied, drawing her blade in a swing of steel and hearing its note ring through the air, “I am a Warden, who’s seen more bloodshed than you ever will, in your insignificant life. I have walked into the very maw of the Darkspawn horde and lived."

“You don’t scare me," she continued. "And you will never hurt me. All you did is hand me an inheritance I thought I was never going to be allowed to touch." The lie actually tasted sweet on her tongue, as she took a step forward and revelled in the way he fought a flinch. “You showed me the path to my seat in Highever, and you even cleared the way for me. I will kill you here today, Howe. But not as an act of remembrance, or revenge. You’re simply just not… _useful_ , to me, anymore. You’ve become cocky, and I’ve gotten everything I need from you. I am now heir to my house, married to the rightful King of Ferelden, and we _will_ end you. And then Loghain. And then I will rule over this kingdom, and run your poor little Nathaniel into poverty and ruin, and you will have given me every tool with which to do so. If you were trying to defeat the house of Cousland, you left the wrong child alive.”

Howe took a small step back. “There it is. Right there! That damned look in the eye, that marked-”

Ismene had had enough. She attacked.

The chamber burst into a frenzy of action. _This_ was what she wanted. The burn of muscle, the ring of steel. The scream of darkspawn taint in her head, as adrenaline kicked in and she _fought for her life_. All those years of feeling powerless, stuff into dresses that arranged her limbs for her, that prevented her from running or from lifting her hands above her head - and _now_ here she was, wielding a weapon as long as her arm, toppling men like pins and snarling and bellowing like a blood-crazed mabari. 

“Crazy bitch!” Howe’s swordpoint hit her in the side at one point, the steel buckling and ribs shattering beneath. The pain was blinding, and for a second the world whited. 

But Ismene trusted her body. It wasn’t easy. It was _never_ easy - it never would be and that was why she _craved it_. She hefted her sword, feeling the air leave her as her side screamed, as she bore the blade’s weight once more. She cleaved a man in two, but was distressed to see it wasn’t Howe - in that moment of pained blindness, someone else had tried to rush her.

“What would your mother say if she saw you now?” Howe gloated, colossally misunderstanding what would get under her skin, once again. “She’d be glad I killed her, and saved her from suffering such a savage of a daughter.”

Ismene spat, a thick gout of bloody phlegm audibly splatting the floor. “That would make… two of us.”

And then she tackled him.

“It’s true,” Howe gasped, seconds or perhaps minutes later, as he choked on blood and watched her level the swordpoint at his sternum, adjusting her grip in preparation to plunge down. He actually looked… _terrified_ of her, and Ismene wished she could freeze that moment for ever, to take in is wide eyed, snuffling fear. “You really _are_ heartless.”

Ismene gave a bitter twist of her mouth, “I try my best.”

And then she ended his life.

After it was done, she thought she would feel something. There was some distant inkling of triumph, but it was the same kind of feeling she got every time she beat Zevran or Alistair or Sten at sparring. The pride of a job well done. _Maybe I am heartless,_ she mused, as she watched the dark, shining stain of Howe’s blood leak across the flagstones. She looked back at her party. Zevran and Morrigan were already moving amongst the bodies, unconcerned as they performed the routine of picking them clean of jewellery and coin. But Alistair was looking at Ismene, frowning. Something between hurt and fear was in his eyes.

“What?” she said, defensively.

“You… you didn’t mean that, did you? What you said? I know you and your family… you said they weren’t kind to you… but you told me you wanted to avenge them - that’s why we… you know... ”

She sighed, sheathing her blade on her back, and wincing as her ribs flashed, a hot and agonising brand across her side. “Alistair, that was all just bullshit in a bid to get him to piss his pants. I actually really quite like Nathaniel. He never wanted to marry me, because I looked far too much like his sister. The one time my mother tried to set the two of us up, we ran away to a tavern for the evening and I got him laid by a rather spectacular sellsword."

"Oh."

"If men get their chance at battlefield bluster, I wanted to give it a shot too. Really, when have _I_ ever wanted to be Queen? I’d kill to _avoid_ the throne, if anything.”

Those words didn’t seem to help. If anything, Alistair looked a little more queasy.

“Well I, for one, found the performance most compelling,” Zevran announced to the air, as he took a wicked looking dagger from one of the corpses and tossed it a foot upwards to test its balance. “And not a little arousing, as always, my dear Warden.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Possibly a little bit of emotional whiplash across the course of this chapter, but there is substantial fluff content in this story, I promise you!!


	4. Chapter Four

Ismene walked up to the bars once more, looked right and left, before letting out a gigantic sigh and coming to sit next to Alistair, back against the slimy dungeon wall. “No guards, yet,” she told him, in a bland but ultimately exhausted voice, like she saw the prospect of launching an escape from one of Ferelden’s most dangerous prisons to simply be overwork, rather than something genuinely terrifying.

After another deep breath, she unexpectedly rested her head on Alistair’s shoulder, and he almost jumped out of his skin. A glance out of his periphery saw her eyes fluttering shut, thick dark lashes curving against her cheek. She looked tired.

Even he had to admit, when they’d seen Ser Cauthrien waiting at the mouth of Howe’s estate, his first reaction had been to groan and think, _hasn’t today been enough?_ He hadn’t actually taken the threat of Loghain’s right hand woman very seriously. Looking at the men she’d bought with her, all he could imagine was that Izzy would barrel through them all like paper on the high of felling Howe. He certainly hadn’t expected them all to be knocked unconscious, unexpectedly peppered with arrows, and to wake up in a cell having all their wounds very kindly patched with magic, but all their equipment gone.

Waking up face down on some really rather unhygienic flagstones, he’d opened his eyes to find Ismene a hairsbreadth from him. All that had been removed was their armour, so she wore some stained, thin underclothes - a plain white shirt whose seams were rusty dark from where blood had leaked through the seams of her plate mail, and woollen leggings. Her face had been peaceful. It said a lot about Ismene Cousland, that the only times she seemed relaxed and rested these days was when she was unconscious. 

_And, of course, when she’s been sleeping in your bed,_ came a treacherous voice in Alistair’s mind - that he liked to pretend was Zevran’s, but actually sounded very very much like his own.

The woman on those flagstones had seemed closer to the girl who’d trudged reluctantly out of Ostagar with him, rather than the snarling warrior who’d stood over Arl Howe’s corpse. Not that he could kid himself that they were different people. Not that he didn’t love them equally, for different reasons. But he so rarely saw softness in her, any more - partly because the world around them seemed to no longer allow it.

_And now you never will,_ he thought, stomach sinking. Two days into marriage, and Ismene had already gotten what exactly she wanted out of the deal, with fucking brutal efficiency. Howe was dead. At this rate, Loghain would be toast by the end of the week. She wouldn’t ever actually want to take the throne - she’d made that more than clear - and she didn’t love him in the slightest… 

So, what? Say she sped through their to-do list of world-saving in roughly… two weeks. Say he was crowned - and Maker knows, probably sitting on a throne made out of an archdemon’s skull, given Iz was so driven to have this all over and done with. She’d ask for an annulment or something, on the grounds of the union not actually being consummated. And then she’d leave him.

Or, what? He’d get what he wanted, and she’d stay. Unwillingly. And he’d have to spend his days knowing he’d trapped her in a life she hated. With a man she didn’t want, either.

“What do you want, when all this was over?” Alistair suddenly blurted out, with all the finesse of a remigold danced in a dress. 

“Hmm…?” Izzy asked him, sleepily. She was bonelessly heavy and starting to drift off in a doze on his shoulder, which must’ve meant she truly was worn down, because she never would’ve done so otherwise.

“Howe’s dead,” Alistair said, wishing he’d just kept his mouth shut. “Is there anything else you want?” 

_Is there anything else I can give you, to make you stay?_

Ismene shifted slightly, but it seemed she was just getting comfortable. He was relieved when she didn’t actually move away from his side. “I don’t know, really,” she said. “I never really think that far ahead anymore. Forward planning was always a rather depressing prospect for me, in the past, and that was before the darkspawn taint.” 

Alistair couldn’t shake the small feeling that Izzy was lying. But then, he didn’t really know her all that well, he supposed. He’d believed what she’d said in the dungeons, and apparently all that had been a performance.

“...I suppose I could reclaim Highever, but I don’t really want it. So much… admin. Bleh. Zevran _did_ offer to show me around Antiva-”

“...Oh?”

“Ugh, don’t say it like that!” Izzy said, crossly, “it’s not a euphemism or anything - I’ve just never been. Maybe I want to sample this fabled ‘summertime’ he speaks of.”

“Ferelden isn’t that bad.”

“I suppose,” she replied, carefully, and he guessed his voice had been a little defensive. He didn’t dare look down at her face for fear that she’d close up again, so he kept his eyes firmly pinned on the bars and the door opposite. After a pause, she began again, “But after all those years of feeling trapped, I thought it might be nice to travel. The way Zevran describes it, it sounds nice. Having that much freedom. Not that we have anything approaching the same taste in recreational activities,” she hastily added, as Alistair’s shoulders began to tense again, of their own accord, and she no doubt felt it. “And I’ll be ruling with you now anyway, so there’s no need to be getting jealous of hypothetical vacations with friends that aren’t ever going to happen-”

“-You don’t have to stay.”

Ismene fell silent, almost like the interruption offended her, and Alistair cursed himself. _No, wait, you were supposed to be trying to_ convince _her to stay, you absolute pillock!_ Wasn’t that the plan?

“I hardly think you can rule without me,” she replied, a little coolly. 

“My apparently _inevitable_ incompetency doesn’t mean I’m going to trap you here with me. I hope you know I’m a little better than that.”

“Well, where was that upstanding moral energy three days ago, when Eamon was coercing us both into the marital bed?”

“ _I thought killing Howe would be harder!_ ” he blurted, suddenly, and then closed his eyes against a wave of humiliation, that he’d fully brought upon himself. “I thought it would, y’know, take longer. That’s what you said you wanted from all of this. I thought you would… I don’t know… need my help?”

There was a silence. And then a little snuffling sound, which he realised was Ismene fighting a laugh. “Oh,” he said, “right. Hilarious.”

In truth, he was actually fighting a smile at the sound of her giggles, himself. Because it had been a while, really. 

“Sorry,” she said, after a moment when she tugged back her composure, “I just… I said that to make you feel better, at the time. Sorry.”

“...What?”

“I didn’t marry you because I wanted to kill Howe, you fool,” she said, nudging her shoulder against his. “How do those two things even correlate? Did you think he’d come over to Eamon’s house and call me out into the streets, like a spurned lover, or something?”

“But that’s… that’s what you said!”

“Yes. I know. I was lying,” she told him, patiently. “I could hardly tell you that it’s because you have no chance at being king without me.”

“...Oh.” For a second, any of that residual hope that had been starting to spark in the pit of his stomach, about her true motives for making that match, actually let out a death cry. The screams were practically audible. He was surprised the two of them didn’t take a moment to mourn their passing.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be mean,” Izzy said, as she ruthlessly carved his heart right out of his chest. “You’re going to be an _amazing_ king - I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought otherwise. But all the politics to get you there? You need me to do that for you. Oswyn was rather a case and point.”

He tried to focus on the positives. “You… want me to be king?”

“Of course I do, Alistair. You’d be wonderful at it. You care way more about the people in this country than Cailan ever did.”

“But I’d need you.”

“Yes,” she said, dryly. “I’m afraid you’d rather be resigned to that fate. You’d be a king that the common folk would rally behind, but I’m the darling of the nobility. Plus, I’m quite good at organising things.”

“Even though you don’t like... admin.”

“...I find admin much more enjoyable when there’s enough money to do it with,” Izzy said, hastily, and both of them knew she was lying. “So I’m afraid you’re rather stuck with me.”

“I’m more worried _you’re_ stuck with _me_.”

“Oh, bless you. Don’t feel like you owe me anything, Ali. It’ll be ok,” she reassured him, as that knife she’d been plunging into his chest for this entire conversation just, you know, _really_ twisted all the way in and found new places even he didn’t know could hurt. “It’s a political arrangement - we both know it, so we’re perfectly entitled to take lovers. I know I’ve already said this, but I won’t resent any connections you chose to make, or uphold-”

“Yes. Right.” Alistair really wondered why Ser Cauthrien hadn’t just finished the job. Maybe this was the form of torture this dungeon specialised in, or something. “So. What you want from all this. Is me on the throne.”

“Yes,” Izzy replied softly, “I think you might be one of the few people in this world who deserve it. And one of even fewer people who would actually use it to do some _good_.”

And that sentence… well. It helped. A little. That pesky speck of hope seemed to revive itself, against Alistair’s better judgement.

“What did you want, before all this?” he asked suddenly.

“Um… didn’t you just ask that?”

“No, I mean, before _everything_ ,” he clarified. “Before the darkspawn. Before Howe’s attack on your home. Before all of it. I know what you _hated_ \- you’ve told us all about it, multiple times over. But what did you _want?_ What did you dream of doing, if you could’ve done anything in the world?”

“Oh,” Ismene said. “Um.” She sighed. “Please promise you won’t laugh.”

“Of course I won’t laugh.”

“ _Seriously._ ”

“I promise.”

“I… well… I always used to daydream about becoming a chantry sister.”

“You _what?_ ” Alistair yelped, which meant she moved away from his shoulder to glare at him, and he immediately regretted it. But still! “It’s just… that can hardly have been your life’s ambition, can it? Every time Leliana talks about the Maker, you make that… that _face_. You don’t even believe in her vision. You barely believe any of the words that come out of her mouth!”

“I… I guess I liked the idea of the peace,” Ismene said. 

“The peace?”

“Some nice little monastery in the mountains. With a library. Maybe some kind of garden. It would’ve been the only kind of freedom my mother would’ve ever allowed me to have. Even _she_ couldn’t stop me from finding the Maker. If I suddenly had a wild fit of devoted chastity, she would’ve had to give into it. My reputation was already veering off in that direction. It seemed like the ideal life at times, honestly.”

They were silent for a breath or two, while Izzy blushed and looked anywhere but him. “...It just,” Alistair said, wishing he could stop himself, “it just doesn’t seem very _‘you’_ , does it?”

“...I was very different, Ali, before I met you,” Ismene replied, in a soft tone of voice that he didn’t think he’d heard from her before. It made his mouth go a little dry.

After a second - reminding him of an aloof cat that didn’t really want to look like it was committing to being petted - she settled against his shoulder again in companionable silence. He imagined putting his arm around her. Maybe stroking her hair. 

He didn’t, of course.

“...Leliana has been to Antiva,” he offered. “Maybe we could go on some kind of diplomatic mission, with her as a spymaster-cum-ladies-maid. Get the best of both worlds.”

He felt the moment she locked up. In fact, he was pretty certain the temperature in the cell dropped a couple of degrees. “Oh,” she said, in that tone of voice that was, in contrast to the previous one, becoming very _very_ familiar. “Is that the role you’ve decided to give her at court, then?”

Alistair was a little confused. He thought Ismene _liked_ Leliana. “Um, well? It’s an option, isn’t it?” he said, carefully, “and I mean, I think she’d be up for it. All that stuff that fell out with Marjolaine, she clearly isn’t quite ready to leave the criminal life behind, is she? She seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself.”

Ismene moved away from him - put a whole foot of space between them. And then she hunched over herself, hugging her knees. “If that’s what you want.”

Honestly, Alistair mostly just didn’t want Ismene gallivanting off to Antiva alone with Zevran. Not with all that talk about these _‘lovers’_ they were apparently completely entitled to take. Even if she didn’t end up falling for Zevran, Zevran was absolutely guaranteed to have some extremely attractive friends.

“I mean,” he said, “we could take Zev as well-”

But then there were footsteps echoing down the corridor. And with a face like thunder - very sexy thunder, if Alistair was honest, her eyes burning bright blue - Ismene ruthlessly undid the top three buttons of her shirt, bit her lip and pinched her cheeks to heighten her colour, and then went about seducing the guard for his keys, beginning their escape.

When they reentered Eamon’s estate, Anora rushed up to hug Ismene, cornsilk hair newly washed and brutally plaited. “Thank you for saving me, and thank the Maker you’re ok!” her friend said, pushing her back to get a look at her, in her borrowed armour covered in both Howe and now Loghain bannermans’ body matter. “And you,” the Queen of Ferelden continued, wheeling on Alistair, “you’re supposed to be the muscle! That’s what you’re… here for? Yes? How dare you let her get hurt?”

“We’re _both_ the muscle these days, Goldie,” Ismene said placatingly, placing herself between her friend and her husband. She took off her helmet, and then gestured down at the rest of her armour. “That’s rather the point.”

“Maker preserve me,” Anora said, staring at her friend’s face like she was seeing a stranger. “I can’t believe you _got tanned_.”

“I know,” Izzy grinned, as she let Anora lead her back into the castle, “mother is rolling in her grave.”

“The Arl has caught me up on everything,” Anora said later that day, perched on the edge of Izzy's bed in her perfect tea-tray posture as Ismene soaked the blood and prison grime off herself in a bathtub by the fire. “Are you _really_ going to support this… this _boy’s_ claim? Just because Eamon says so?”

“Alistair’s my age, Anora,” Ismene said, dunking her head under the water again. She’d had the water changed out once, and this round was pleasant and scented with lavender, rather than just being black with dirt. “He’s seen more battle than either of us, and probably more of the world, too, given the way our parents wrapped us both in cotton wool. You’re only two years older, and younger than us when you took the throne.”

“Yes, well, for the first year or so it was my parents running things,” Anora said with a sniff. 

Ismene gave her a look, that she hoped conveyed the rather stark fact that her father was still very much _‘running things’._

Anora sighed, “...Why him?”

“Because he’s qualified.”

“Ahh yes, his mother just happened to be ploughed with the right seed. What a qualification that is!” Anora said dismissively. “Of fine Theirin stock! What a loss to the world it would be, if Marric’s line were to die out.”

Izzy fought a wince - given that Ali was, quite technically, barren. At least, they thought he was. She certainly was, and hadn’t that been a _fun_ conversation to have, when it was six months in, she hadn’t bled, and it turned out that Ali had been rather hoping that _Duncan_ would have somehow broken that news between ramming darkspawn blood down her gullet and getting killed on the battlefield. 

“And I think… I think he’d be good at it.”

“ _I’d_ be good at it!” Anora said, indignantly - and that was when Ismene began to realise what this was truly about.

She’d never considered - well actually, yes, of course she’d thought about it. When she’d first heard of Cailan’s death, it had been her very first thought. Anora Mac Tir, on the throne, finally getting acknowledgement for all the work she already did behind the scenes. But Anora _hated_ the palace, and she hated Denerim, and her father wanted Ismene dead, so that was also rather inconvenient. Ismene had never considered that Anora might actually want to…

“You’d be amazing,” she told her friend, sincerely - because she would be. Despite Loghain’s xenophobia, Anora had somehow managed to maintain cordial relations with her friends in the Orlesian court, and it certainly hadn’t been _Cailan_ handling the Ferelden treasury finances all these years, except for perhaps its military budget -

But then, she presented Anora with the logical conclusion all of her own daydreaming and conjecture had eventually reached. 

“...But you don’t have an heir,” Ismene told her gently. “If you took the throne, you’d have to produce one, in order to secure the position and prevent any backstabbing in a decade’s time. With Alistair, it won’t matter, so long as he has the necessary equipment,” and by that she meant ‘penis’, or maybe instead simply ‘not a womb’, which seemed to be what a lot of the Banns had the biggest issue with. “They’ll hold out hope he’ll get someone pregnant by his seventy-fifth name day, or whatever. But with you...”

She looked at Anora, who was twenty-two years old. She knew what people would already say about her behind her back - what they always said about women. _Maybe she’s too old already._

“...Look. Do you _want_ to get married again?”

Anora held her gaze for a couple of seconds of simmering, indignant silence, and then sighed and said, “no.”

As Ismene knew she would. It was the same conclusion she herself had reached, when Eamon had taken Ali aside in his manor and left her alone, and she’d sat there, knowing exactly what they were talking about, and wondering when exactly she was going to be consulted on the matter. 

She’d known that this was Anora’s one chance to get out. Her friend had paid the high price it took to buy Iz her freedom, aged thirteen, all those years ago. Which was why she’d decided to be the one to take the fall instead, this time. Anora had one marriage under her belt, and what a rotten marriage it had been. Izzy might as well even the score, for her sake.

_And such a punishment, marrying Alistair,_ was that little selfish, foolish noise in the back of her head, that she quickly quelled. Yes, Ali was certainly no Cailan. At least the two of them liked each other. At least they were friends. At least he seemed to love just one person, rather than sleeping with anybody but the woman he committed himself to. At least he was kind, and he would be with Leliana but he wouldn’t be _gauche_ about it. And maybe they could still spar together every morning, and he wouldn’t mind if she wanted to horse-ride regardless of what it might do to her hips, and they’d share wine over firelit dinners as they laughed and told stories about camping in the Ferelden country and she would -

“You _do_ love him,” Anora said suddenly, genuinely horrified, and then Ismene really was cursing herself, because she’d forgotten what it was like to be around people who not only knew her, but could also read her through all the layers of Orlesian manners and etiquette that kept her face carefully blank to all but those who understood the language.

“No!” she replied, voice high and utterly unconvincing, as she quickly began to contemplate drowning herself in the tub. 

“You do!”

“I mean - he’s just - he’s _nice_ , ok?” said Iz, and Anora looked disgusted, as she had every right to be. Ismene forged ahead, telling herself it was best to get this conversation over and done with, and not believing that in the least. “But he doesn’t feel the same way, and I’m not an idiot. This is an entirely political decision. I’m not going to _faun_ over him like some lost lamb, come on, you know me better than -”

“-Ismene? Eamon wants to talk to you, about what we saw in the dungeons, and which Banns we should reach out to ne-” Completely oblivious to the conversation was taking place, Alistair burst through the door into her bedroom - which Ismene supposed was _their_ bedroom, now, and she hadn’t actually told anyone she was taking a bath, apart from the servants...

He trailed off, his words getting lost in something that sounded a little like choking. Horrified and yet unbearably curious, she snuck a glance over her bare, wet shoulder, pulling her dripping hair out of the way to see him rapidly turning crimson, the flush creeping across his face and down his neck, while his mouth hung a little open. He didn’t seem to know where to look, but also couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

“Are you staying or going? Or are you just going to leave the door wide open and give everyone a free show?” Anora asked him, conversationally. Ali jumped and let out a tiny girlish scream, having clearly not noticed there was anyone else in the room.

It was enough to make time restart again. “ _Oh my goodness, get out!_ ” Ismene shrieked, dunking as much of herself as she could under the water until only her eyes peeked over the rim of the tub. Alistair seemed more than happy to oblige, stumbling blindly backwards and tripping over the edge of the doorframe in his bid for escape, and making it about five paces away before hastily remembering himself and returning to shut the door.

“Maker’s breath!” Anora cried to the air, a few moments after they heard him all but run down the corridor, away from them. “Yes, clearly he’s not interested! _At all!_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every one of my Dragon Age OCs is probably a little bit of a self insert. What trait of mine does Ismene possess? It's the Yearning for Cottagecore.
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the chapter. Poor Alistair. Poor Ismene. Truly idiots-to-lovers.


	5. Chapter Five

It was their second week of being married, and Alistair thought he finally had the hang of lying to himself and Ismene, every waking moment of the day.

To be fair, it was the _non-waking_ moments that were proving difficult. Every morning, he woke again to find Izzy sprawled all over him, wrapped around his body like a particularly amorous vine entwined with a tree trunk. A tree trunk that was _desperately trying not to think of anything_ , except maybe that tree trunk’s stern, po-faced Chantry schoolmistress, in the hope of keeping certain… _wooden_ reactions under a margin of control.

On the fourth morning, they both woke up together, which meant that neither of them could no longer pretend that it wasn’t happening - as Alistair had the last three days, in the perverse and masochistic hope that the streak would continue. Izzy nuzzled his collarbone, burrowing in deep against his chest as she tried to chase after the dissolving remnants of sleep. Alistair unsuccessfully bit back a yelp that thankfully didn’t become a groan (the only saving grace for his pride), and then suddenly her eyes were wide open, as were his, and she was jumping off of him like a scalded cat, red-faced and mortified. 

“Oh, Maker’s fucking balls! Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry!” Ismene muttered, head in her hands and dark hair in wild disarray. “I swear to you, I am _right at the fucking edge_ of the bed whenever I get to sleep. I don’t know how this _keeps happening_!”

“I - it’s fine,” he said, weakly, keeping his eyes pinned to the bed canopy as he tried to control his heart rate and breathing. 

“I swear to you, I’ll start sleeping on the settee.”

“You can’t sleep on the _settee_.”

“On the floor, then.”

“Iz,” Alistair stopped her, before she came to the far more logical conclusion of them being seen going to bed together, and then him sneaking back to his room when everyone was asleep, and sneaking back in the morning to continue the ruse. He couldn’t have that happen... because then that would mean they wouldn’t be sharing a bed anymore. “I don’t mind.”

“You… don’t mind?”

Alistair hoped he wasn’t blushing. And he hoped that his Chantry teachings were all lies, and that the Maker wasn't about to smite him where he lay for the colossal untruth he was about to tell. “That is,” he said, carefully, “it doesn’t bother me. I know I’m… very warm. All that time in tents, it’s bound to do something to a person - your body has probably been trained up after all those months cuddling her ladyship.”

Ismene didn’t look very convinced at this blatant appeal to her heart by namedropping Lady Imelda Snuffles. Alistair rallied. “And, you know, we’re friends. I’ve literally pulled you _out_ of an exploded broodmother. I feel like that was above and beyond the call of friendship-ly duty. I can very easily suffer through some snuggles, in comparison. I’m not letting my friend _sleep on the floor_.”

Alistair wondered if she’d noticed that he didn’t offer to take the floor, as any valiant gentleman would. He would've considered himself a valiant gentleman, right up until this moment, but it turned out he was actually an extremely selfish man.

He wasn’t sure how well Izzy took being compared to an exploded broodmother, either, but he was desperate for her not to realise how desperate he was for her to stay.

“But I… I keep drooling on your shirts,” she told him, wretchedly. 

“I’m going to be king,” he said, recklessly. “I’ll have a lot of shirts to drool on.”

_And, well, you got what you wanted, didn’t you, you fucking idiot,_ Alistair thought, as he struggled to pay attention to his breakfast. Last night, Ismene had thrown a leg up and over his waist as she rolled over, which had resulted in another night of roughly three hours sleep. And five hours of _trying to sleep_ , while his mind raced wondering how bad it would be if he just flipped the two of them over, pressed her into the mattress, and finally kissed her, regardless of the outcome. He was fucking _shattered_ , and Maker damn him to the Void, he couldn’t really regret it. Except he did - because apparently Ismene had none of these same misgivings, and spent her nights getting a full eight or even ten hours, without being bothered by a single carnal desire in his presence.

“Alistair?” a voice startled him out of his staring contest with his scrambled eggs, and there she was, fresh faced with no visible signs of fatigue, her hair braided back from her face. “Did you hear me?”

“Um… no?” he said, intelligently.

“I found her,” Ismene told him, with a tentative look of anticipation in her face. When he remained silent, she clarified, “Goldanna.”

Alistair was surprised at the pronouncement, and it actually took his brain a couple of seconds to catch up. Which meant that, upon the news of hearing he could meet his half-sister, his first words were: “you were... looking for her?”

“...Yes. I mean. I just thought. Before you’re crowned, or you know, stabbed by Loghain, it might be nice to, um… meet her.” Izzy looked a little frustrated, but also a lot bashful. It was exactly the look she'd had whenever she tried to give him a gift on their travels, and then had to admit she’d plucked it out of rubble, or out of a box that very much belonged to someone else, or from a corpse.

He’d loved every single one of those gifts, in all honesty, regardless of how they’d been scrounged. He thought it might even have meant something… until he saw Izzy flinging shiny silver things at Morrigan whenever the apostate bitched too hard about how many days in a row they’d been walking, or filching Oghren some ludicrously expensive liquor after his guilt about Branca began to affect his beserker rages. Or when she got Sten his sword back, after he threatened to leave the group. It was all just _people management_ , which he supposed was a bit cynical of him, but still! His gifts weren’t even that special... apart from the amulet.

Ok, the amulet was very special. And it wasn't Izzy's fault that he didn't have special sword that was apparently part of his soul like Sten did, as if Qunari were born in a blacksmith’s forge just primed and ready to stab. Maybe he was just a little bitter about how she’d used that particular fetch and carry mission as a way to avoid him for two weeks, after his… _declaration_.

“So… I, um, asked Zevran to look into it,” Ismene finally got out through her teeth. “And he… um. Found her. Here. In Denerim.”

“...We knew she was here. In Denerim.”

“Um. Well. _Here._ In Denerim. About five minutes away. If you… um… want to go? Today, maybe? Um. I could… go with you? Unless you want to go alone!”

Alistair was too shocked and too tired to fully articulate how he felt, or what he wanted. Further down the table, Anora Mac Tir - who he had not spoken more than two words to, and who he was half convinced would murder him in his sleep if pressed - raised her eyes to the heavens, beseeching some unseen force. He supposed that Loghain’s privileged daughter would disdain the idea of the king having a relative who lived in the market district. She’d probably find it prudent if both he and Izzy just left her there, untouched.

“Yes. That would be nice,” Alistair said, stupidly. “And you should probably come - given that we’re married.”

Ismene blinked at him, as if the thought hadn’t crossed her mind that she might be considered his family too. 

“This is your sister, yes?” Leliana said, from her seat between him and Wynne, “isn’t that wonderful, Alistair! You’ll finally get to meet her! I’m so happy for you!”

“Thanks, Lel,” he said, and smiled over at her, because Leliana was _so easy_ to be around. She wasn’t deathly intimidating, and she didn’t make him feel just a little bit stupid and like he’d said the wrong thing whenever he opened his mouth.

...And she also didn’t maul him in his sleep, to throw him even further off his game.

When he looked back at Ismene, her defences were up once again. Any of that timid excitement had left. “Well,” she said, immediately business-like, as she pulled a carefully folded piece of paper out of her pocket and put it in front of him on the table. “Here’s the address. If you _do_ want to go with me, I’ll be down in the training yard. Just call on me, if you like.” 

And then she walked out.

The house was unassuming and small, and they had in fact walked past it several times on their travels throughout the city. 

“...Isn’t there something we ought to do today?” Alistair blurted, suddenly. “About my bid? For the throne. We really don’t have time to pay a visit, do we? Maybe we should go.”

“ _Alistair_ ,” Ismene said. He had that ‘startled deer’ look she’d seen on his face a couple of times before, like when he stuttered through his explanation of who exactly his father was on their walk into Redcliffe, and tripped over his own feet in the process. Or when he’d walked up to Eamon’s room. After literally trekking after an ancient relic most were sure didn’t exist, to wake this one, single man from his stupor, he'd faltered at the doorframe, his fingers trembling. Izzy had been able to tell he was expecting to be rejected, again. Sent away, even after he'd saved the Arl's life. She had held his hand, and hadn’t even minded that it was clammy. 

“The throne can wait until tomorrow,” she told him now, quietly. “Let’s meet your sister.”

He swallowed, audibly. “Right? Right.”

Iz wanted to hold his hand again. She settled for laying a hand on his shoulder instead - it was nice and impersonal, and made him very easy to steer. “I’m right here,” she said, wondering if he’d prefer to have someone else at his side. 

She got him three steps closer to the door before he froze up again. “What do I even say?”

“I find ‘hello’ to be a good start.”

“‘Hello, I’m your brother’?”

“I mean, it’s better than nothing,” Izzy said with a shrug, before pausing, “but then, my nickname is ‘the Fortress of Highever’. So maybe I’m not the person to be giving you advice on how to make a good first impression…”

“What are you talking about? I loved you the moment I met you!” Alistair replied. 

And then both of them froze up, in the middle of the Denerim square, wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and choking at this declaration, both seemingly unable to move a fucking muscle.

_Only Alistair,_ Ismene thought. Only Alistair would accidentally make a declaration of love, to his wife who was not really his wife, or his lover. She remembered when he’d accidentally drawn attention to Morrigan’s cleavage while travelling in Wintermarch - “isn’t it a little… um… chilly today?” - or when he’d interrogated Sten a little too closely about his ‘deep, personal connection with his sword’, and she and Zevran hadn’t stopped laughing for over an hour. 

Or when he tried to navigate a tipsy conversation they’d had on watch about sexual experience, solely through the medium of lampposts.

“That is,” he coughed, his voice sounding all kinds of forced, “you defended me from that mage by menacing him with your steely glare without question, and so I knew we would be fast friends.”

She cleared her throat as well. “Or you’d be victim to that said steely glare, of course.”

“Yes,” he replied, voice high, “no choice, really!”

“...To your sister?”

“Yes! To Goldanna!”

It seemed that one way to force a person into an awkward situation was to make something even more awkward occur, so that they were both desperate to escape it. They strode up to Goldanna’s door in double time, and Alistair didn’t even need prompting before he knocked, way too loudly, on the door. “Err, hello!” he said, to the air.

“Eh? You have linens to wash?” 

The door opened, to reveal a woman paler than Alistair. In fact, the first thing Ismene noticed was that her entire colouring was different to Alistair's. Her hair was a practical, ruthlessly hacked, but also bright auburn, even when it was a few days since washed. Ismene had known he was blonde from Marric, of course - that same burnished gold of Cailan, only a little muted because the rest of him was less… shiny. The only real similarity between the two people now in front of her was in the eyes - both brown. 

Although, even there, Izzy didn’t think they were the same shade: Goldanna’s were dark, the deep colour of varnished wood, whereas Alistair’s were a lighter, autumnal hazel. There were flecks of green and gold in his, if you looked closely. 

_Maybe there are with Goldanna too,_ she thought, logically, _you just didn’t spend five months of your trek gazing into them like a love-struck fool._

Alistair had been talking with his sister this whole time she was reminiscing, rather proving her point. “Look,” he said, clearing his throat, “our mother, she worked as a servant in Redcliffe Castle, a long time ago. Before she died. Did you-”

“You! I knew it! They told me you was dead! They told me the babe was dead along with mother, but I knew they was lying!”

“Who?” Alistair demanded, “who told you that?”

“Them’s at the castle,” Goldanna replied flatly, giving Ismene yet another reason to despise King Marric. “I told them the babe was the King’s, and they said he was dead. Gave me a coin to shut my mouth, and then sent me on my way.”

Ali looked genuinely shocked by this revelation, although it didn’t really surprise Izzy in the least. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that. The babe didn’t die. I’m him, I’m your brother-”

“For all the good it does me! You killed mother, you did, and I’ve had to scrape by all this time? That coin didn’t last long, and when they went back, they ran me off!”

That caught Ismene’s attention.

“You… went back?” she asked, carefully. “...For more gold?”

She couldn’t begrudge the woman for wanting money to take care of a child. But that was a pretty barefaced admission of blackmail.

Unfortunately, that was the first time Ismene had spoken in front of Alistair's sister, and her accent gave her away, in a way that Alistair’s didn’t. Goldanna paused to look at her, and immediately reassessed the two of them. The new glint in her eye was one Izzy recognised instinctively, the moment it appeared. Greedy. _Mercenary_. Suddenly, these strangers were worth something to her. Neither of them were in armour, but their clothing was dyed in bright colours, and the sword buckled to Ali’s hip was enchanted. The wealth in their demeanour was obvious. 

“And who are you, then?” Goldanna asked.

Ismene didn’t want to say anything, which is why she was surprised when Alistair replied, a little defensively, “she’s my wife.”

“Oh.” And then Goldanna’s face lit up with understanding. “ _Oh_. All the rumours are true, then. You’re not just him, you’re _him_. The bastard who’s pinning his hopes on the throne. Who slaughtered the Howe estate, few days back. And this is that frigid noble bitch, using you for her shot at popping out a king and gettin’ her family back in power.”

Ismene blinked. _Huh_. It was, quite literally, a pauper’s version of what she’d yelled at Rendon Howe, when she killed him. Either witnesses had survived to spread the story, or it had evolved organically, on its own. She didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing, honestly. Having their bid focused on the Cousland name might do better than if it was solely about Marric’s illegitimate son. But then again, people bloody hated it when a woman was seen to be power-hungry, or exerting an undue amount of influence, unattached to anything -

“Hey!” Alistair said, suddenly, angry in a way Iz hadn’t expected, and startling her from her thoughts. “Don’t you dare speak about her that way. She’s my closest friend, and the most honourable person I know. A Grey Warden, just like me! _Better_ than me, even.”

Ismene knew she shouldn’t be surprised to hear him talk about her like that. Alistair was the kindest person she knew, and judged other people by the standard he set himself. 

Still, she fought off a painful spasm in her heart at the praise, and the accompanying blush.

“Ooh, I see,” Goldanna smirked, “a prince and a Grey Warden, with his hoighty-toighty wife with all her spotless _honour_. Well, who am I to think poorly of someone so high and mighty compared to me? I don’t know you, boy. Your royal father forced himself on my mother and took her away from me, and what do I have to show for it? Nothing! They tricked me good. I should’ve told everyone!”

Ismene started to feel something light up within her, that quicksilver anger that she always kept caged behind her veneer of nobility. She didn’t entirely understand it. Goldanna wasn’t saying anything Iz hadn’t thought herself - in the months since Ali had confessed his identity. The cover up, the wardship in Redcliffe… when you heard of palace staff getting pregnant and the entire thing being hushed up, you couldn’t help but think… And she knew that Cailan, at least, had some bastards - or at least some women he’d met recreationally that Anora had paid off herself, shipped off to the country or to one of those nice monasteries Ismene used to hear so much about. 

But still... she glanced over at Alistair. Who she knew had never thought these things about the father he’d never met, not once, not until this moment - because it would never occur to _him_. Because he would never act like that, himself. He’d thought he was a dirty secret, not that his mother was one, or that his birth spoke of greater crimes, dusted carefully under the rugs in noble houses. She saw his expression of wounded comprehension, as it began to dawn who he was, and who he might be. Izzy felt like she wanted to rip a shield from a nearby guard and plonk it down in front of both of them. Maybe shieldbash Goldanna for good measure.

“Hey,” she said, “listen here-”

“I’ve got five mouths to feed,” Goldanna continued, not letting her finish, or even start. “And unless you can help with that, I got less than no use for you.”

“I - I’m sorry,” Alistair was stuttering, the hopeful light going out of his eyes, “I - I don’t know what to say-”

Izzy thought about what she’d intruded on in the Fade, when searching Alistair out in the sloth demon's prison. Her encounter with his fantasy of a happy family. He’d asked her to join the table, held her hand and beamed as he pointed out nieces and nephews. Tugged her into the circle of his arm and ushered her forward, as if she belonged there too…

There was something fiercely protective welling up inside her. Against her better judgement, she now wanted to _hurt_ this woman. 

But this woman was Alistair’s dream, so Iz maintained a veneer of brutally cordial politeness. “Regardless of the kind of man Marric might have been,” she said, her voice icy, “it has nothing to do with Alistair. You have a brother, here in front of you. He’s a _good man_. He came here, hoping to find his family.”

“Well, he’s found it, alright,” the woman retorted, “and what’s he going to do with it? Move me to the castle with him, when he claims it? Doesn’t seem likely. Or would he keep me under stairs like a dirty secret, the same way his father did my mother? Or maybe he didn’t think of that at all. Maybe he planned to visit me on weekends, come down from on high and sit at my table and expect me to entertain him, when I can barely feed meself?”

Ismene’s heart was thundering, with all the dread of Ostagar. Alistair’s face was crumpling. She knew he hadn’t planned for... any of those eventualities. He hadn’t planned any further than meeting his sister. But how could he, when all she’d done was spring this meeting on him this morning, thinking it would make him happy?

“If you’ve been pining after a sister all these years, you’ve had too much time on your hands, boy. I suppose that’s what comes from privilege,” Goldanna shrugged. “You can worry ‘bout those other than yourself. I don’t have that luxury.”

“I didn’t have the life you think I did,” Alistair choked out. Imagining the boy who’d sabotaged himself, run away to join the Templars and then the Wardens in turn, and subsequently lost any family he’d ever had, Ismene desperately repressed the urge to hit Goldanna.

“No, I suppose not. A bastard is still a bastard. But you’re a bastard with a pretty nobleborn girl at your side, and clothes worth more than I can earn in a year,” she said. “With all that, why would you ever need me?”

“I - I thought-”

“You - you thought… what? You wanted another woman to faun over you, clean up your messes, tell you she admired you and your grand deeds? You and your shiny, stinking father mean nothing to me, little boy. Either you give me what my mother’s death denied me,” and by that, the woman meant ‘wealth’, “or you get out of this house. Everything else you can save up for your wife. Let her make you feel important, in the wee hours.”

“How much do you want?”

Both Alistair and Goldanna’s eyes snapped over to Ismene in surprise as she interrupted their mounting argument. She supposed she had said the words in the same manner as a threat, ground out through gritted teeth. 

She spoke again, noble accent all glass edges for Goldanna to cut herself on. “Well, that’s what you're actually asking, isn’t it? You’ve said your little speech and made yourself feel so much better about your scrounging. But that’s all it is. If Alistair wanted to see you again, and have a _worthwhile_ conversation - how much would you want?”

“Ismene-” 

She didn’t know if Alistair’s wariness was because she was treating his incipient familial relationship as a transaction, or because he’d been there for all those months they spent picking corpses clean for their coppers and silvers and golds, worrying over where they might hope to sleep in the next town. 

“Thirty gold,” Goldanna said. Alistair flinched, and Ismene schooled her expression to indifference. It was both a paltry sum, and extortion, for a chance at affection that Alistair offered freely.

Ismene trailed her eyes around the room in a pointed manner, talking in every sign of poverty and every sign of these five children Goldanna repeatedly invoked. While part of her felt sympathy, she didn’t show it in this moment, instead letting her lip curl and making it so that each one of them was an embarrassment for the woman: a weapon Izzy could wield against her. “Have fifty,” she said, because this woman was Alistair’s _family_ , and then she flung her coin purse at the woman’s feet in a way that would’ve made the late Eleanor Cousland _extremely_ proud.

Goldanna fell upon it, barely even stopping to note the slight. “You - you don’t have to-” Alistair choked out, and for a second Ismene thought he was talking to her, before his voice continued with a shake, “you don’t have to see me again. You can just have the gold. Don’t feel obliged-”

“ _Alistair_ ,” Ismene said, her voice brimming with fury. It was ferocious enough that both people in the room paused to look at her - something a young Ismene could have only dreamed of. 

She looked at the woman, hoping the aura carried a weight of authority, “in a month’s time, this man and I are going to fight an archdemon that threatens everyone in Thedas, not just you and your five children. And when we kill it, and save Ferelden from the Fifth Blight as the _only two Grey Wardens left alive in all of the country_ ,” she supposed Riordan had stumbled out of Howe’s dungeon, but fuck it, it counted, “you are going to have the _basic human decency_ to give him a cordial conversation. Alistair has been alone for years. He has sacrificed himself for the good of this realm, for years. I don’t care how selfish you are, you _will not_ ruin this for him.”

Goldanna blinked at her, open-mouthed and visibly frightened. Ismene realised suddenly that this woman was… just a commoner. The kind that were whipped into obedience by wealth and authority, just out of instinct and self-preservation. “Um, yes, mum,” she mumbled, finally, and Ismene gave a smile that wasn’t a smile in the slightest.

“You’ll be _lucky_ to know him,” she said to the woman, and even she had to admit that sounded more like an ominous promise than an endorsement. “And you know what? You’d be _fucking blessed_ to have him as your King.”

Alistair, by this point, was also looking a little terrified. And why wouldn't he? Izzy had just menaced his sister in front of him. 

She wasn't a good person. She knew that - it was time he knew it too.

“Come on, Ali, she’s obviously busy,” Ismene said, in her normal voice, to try and startle him into a hasty retreat. “We can come back another time. Maybe send a letter ahead, a little advanced notice.” She fought off the petty urge to ask the woman if she could read.

“Um, yes, of course,” he muttered weakly. And this time, Ismene _did_ take his hand, leading him out without a second glance back at Goldanna, who she knew would be on her knees, counting the gold in her hands. She closed the door behind them.

Alistair was quiet and listless as they walked away from the house. And so Ismene broke the silence, her pent-up anger needing somewhere to go. 

“Maker’s fucking breath,” she ground out, tugging him forward. A city guard looked at the two of them with speculation in his eyes, and she realised he recognised her, and had worked out who exactly she was leading by the hand. _Good_. The rumours of their marriage would keep spreading. “It says a lot about a person, that a fucking _demon_ wearing their _face_ makes for better company-”

“That… wasn’t what I expected…”

“Yes, and that’s my fault,” Ismene said. “I should’ve prepared you for the worst, I don’t know why-” 

Normally that was all she did. Every battle they'd waged, every quest they'd embarked on, she'd always planned for the odds to be stacked against them. Surely the same principle applied here. But then... she rarely found people who didn’t _like_ Alistair. Half their party found him annoying, to be sure, but for all their bluster and rolled eyes, even _Morrigan_ now saved him from killing blows without second thought. 

Ismene had not considered pessimism, where Ali was concerned. _She_ loved him like family, when she hadn’t loved _anybody_. Not her own mother, not the endless parade of people desperately trying to woo the Fortress of Highever, or the other set of people who tried to woo _her,_ in those brief moments of anonymity she’d tasted sneaking into taverns and away from polite society. She'd had no realy friends before him, save Anora, who she was pretty sure had banded together with her purely out of solidarity, in the beginning.

She hadn’t considered that anyone... wouldn’t like him.

“That’s the family I’ve been wondering about all my life?” Ali asked the air, incredulously. “I could’ve had _anything_ in my Fade visions. I could’ve-” he glanced over at her, then away, “what a bloody waste. That… that… that _shrew_ is my sister? I can’t believe it. I feel like a complete idiot.”

“You’re _not_ an idiot. You can’t think that.” _Ismene_ was the fool, for not thinking the worst, for not thinking-

“I guess. But I... I still feel stupid. I thought she’d, I dunno, accept me, without question? Isn’t that what family is supposed to do?”

Ismene couldn’t stop herself. She let out a bitter laugh before she thought through the ramifications of it, as she imagined a world where Eleanor Cousland had let her ride and practice archery and fight with swords on the training ground with her brother, rather than bundling her up in a room with embroidery and a candle to see it by, and hoping boredom would somehow tame her and maybe make her broody as a bonus. Or maybe just a world where Eleanor had not seen her like a gambling chip, to throw in with some other house in the hope of a grander success.

But in the moment, she wasn’t laughing at Eleanor. She was laughing at _Alistair_. He watched as she failed to resist the sourness of irony, and kept watching as her laugh went on a little too long. There was pure heartbreak in his eyes. 

“I’m sorry - I know that you and your family -”

“ _No_ , Alistair,” Ismene said, stopping them in the middle of the street. She span to face him. “Stop apologising! You just had a shitty person treat you shittily, and now I’m laughing and being a bitch about it-”

“You’re not a bitch-”

“ _I_ should be apologising to _you_ ,” she continued. “I foisted this on you without second thought and now this woman is making you think… This isn’t your fault, Ali. It isn’t... it isn't ‘naive’ to think that you deserve respect. It might be a little naive to think you’ll get it automatically but… You _deserve_ respect, Ali. You deserve love. You’re one of the best people I know, and you should have people who tell you that, every day. Fuck that woman and her five fucking kids, she doesn’t fucking know you! _I_ know you, and you’re wonderful! Marric could’ve been the worst man alive, eaten babies for all I care, and you’d still be a good person. We’re not defined by our parents or our pasts, only what we do in the present. And in the last fourteen months you’ve saved my life more times than I can count. Don’t feel shame for something you couldn’t control, or that might never even have happened. Own who you are now. Realise that who you are now... _deserves more_. You need to learn how to… to… take up space!”

She’d meant for the speech to be confrontational - instead, it was becoming impassioned. Alistair was looking down at her wide-eyed, like she’d grown a second head. 

She was still holding his hand. It was now caged in both of hers, and she was holding it to her heart, pleading with him to believe her. She faltered in her words once she noticed how they were positioned... and hastily dropped her grip, taking a step back and away from him.

“And I know everyone else thinks it too,” she said, quietly, eyes trailing to the ground. “We all care about you, Ali. Zevran, Wynne,” she swallowed, “Leliana. We… I know you felt like the Grey Wardens were your family. I’m sorry you’ve… you’ve lost them.” Had to give them up, even, to become king. “But, I mean… we’re all still here. We could… we could be your family.”

That declaration was met by a wall of silence, and Ismene fought the urge to quail and wince. Her offer had been weak and ill-timed, but she couldn’t take it back now. Instead, she pulled on the mantle of the Fortress of Highever, making herself sure and confident, turning this moment from one of vulnerability to one of generosity. It was a generous offer, she told herself. One that Alistair, her best friend and the person she loved in many ways, was… _lucky_ , to receive.

Iz didn’t exactly think his silence was a refusal. He wasn’t always the quickest or most eloquent, when it came to words. He looked quite stunned. 

A moment later, he finally spoke. “Even… Morrigan?” he asked, dubiously.

Ismene blinked at him. Then she smiled, relieved, as she noticed the humour sparking behind his eyes, deliberately breaking the seriousness of the moment. All the tension leaked out of the situation, and suddenly it was just the two of them again, being idiots. 

“Once, I saw her use a healing spell on you,” she immediately confided. “Completely unasked.”

“I’m not sure I believe you,” he teased, “I’m pretty certain that hag would turn into a bear, just to defecate on my corpse.”

“As if I’d ever let her."

Alistair’s face was losing its lost gaze. He was grinning again. “You see,” he said, making a theatrical gesture to the air with one of his hands. With the other, he took her hand again, and threaded their fingers together. Before Iz had a chance to protest, he began tugging her down the street. “This was my master plan all along! Find the one woman in Thedas scarier than Old Morrigan SpiderFingers, add her and her dog to my party... profit.”

“The amount of silver we’ve had to part with, I’m not sure ‘profit’ ever factors into a relationship with Morrigan,” Izzy joked. “But, if I’m scarier than the next Witch of the Wilds, I’m not about to complain.” 

“Ten times as scary. Terrifying. People across the land have nightmares of you, I’m certain.”

She snorted. “That one templar in Kinloch certainly does.”

"It's... quite nice," Alistair said, suddenly, faltering. "When that amount of scariness is on your side. Thank you... for coming with me, just now."

Izzy was surprised he would say that. Had he bought Leliana, or Maker, even Zevran, the conversation with Goldanna would've gone a lot smoother, and definitely wouldn't have ended up with her on her knees, gathering up coin. 

But she supposed that Alistair had never really had anyone to defend his corner. Eamon certainly hadn't fought for him anywhere as near as much as he could, in her opinion. Even Duncan had abandoned them, as much as that hadn't ever been his choice. 

Izzy had been like that, as a child, too. It had shaped her, as much as it had him, but in very different ways. With no one to protect him, Alistair had instead chosen to protect _everyone_. He was always the one taking blows for them, on the battlefield, while people simply scrambled to get out of the reach of Ismene's sword. 

She had chosen to protect only herself... and Alistair. And maybe sometimes Anora. It was easier to fight when there were very few people you cared about - very few people you feared to lose. You could focus all your energy just on them, and the rest of the world fell away to insignificance. A small, selfish, and ugly part of her was glad there were so few Wardens left. It meant that Alistair had to stay with her. It meant that their quest didn't require her to be loyal to a cause: she only needed to be loyal to him.

The whole of Highever had burned, just so that she could meet Alistair.

She glanced over at him, willing him to understand. “Everyone is out for themselves, Alistair. Which means we’ve got to look out for each other.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this chapter. It was difficult to write. I always feel very conflicted about Goldanna - I feel like her actions are pretty justified, honestly, and only become slightly awful once you know who Alistair's parents really are. I also never harden Alistair whenever I play Origins (but then, I never play as Cousland either). 
> 
> However, this all seemed thoroughly in character for Ismene, so here you go! Some very, very aggressive and selfish found family feels - the only flavour of energy I have left, this late in 2020.


	6. Chapter Six

There were parts of The Pearl that were dingy, but from the colour and cut of the silk the whores were wearing, Iz figured that that was probably deliberate. The Pearl was well kept in all the ways it needed to be. Under the perfume and the alcohol, she could smell wood polish.

The liquor was also smooth. It had cost enough to warrant it, and passed down her throat with nothing but a light burn. If you’d asked Ismene yesterday if she would be getting drunk in a brothel - with her husband, of all people - she’d probably have laughed. But after the disaster of the morning, and the bitter aftertaste of Goldanna’s disdain, she’d not so subtly roped everyone into a trip out into the city at night, in the hopes that the novelty and the alcohol would provide enough of a distraction. Zevran needed information on where the Crows were operating in the city in order to best avoid them, and Alistair needed to forget his horrible sister.

Ismene watched as Zevran and Isabela, the informant he’d come here to meet, talked in the corner over their own round of drinks. It didn't seem like the pirate would cause them any trouble, as she threw her head back and laughed at one of Zev's jokes. But Ismene decided it would be best for her to be the one on her guard. She wasn't dressed up, and wasn't here to get drunk either, although she could probably be persuaded eventually, once they were all in the clear. She didn’t have her sword on her, but she did have a few knives on her belt, in case the assassin’s old friend had sold him out to the Crows. 

She placed her glass back down with a slight pinch of her lips, while Alistair sputtered on the final swallow. Iz couldn’t quite work out if that was because he wasn’t used to the strength of the spirits, or because a woman had just walked past their table with her tits hanging out. Or as good as: the neckline of her dress was so low that whether it successfully covered nipple or not seemed entirely dependent on the angle of one’s gaze. The lady, with dark auburn hair and admittedly, some truly impressive tits, had her eyes trained on their table like she’d cast out a fishing lure. As Alistair coughed, he went completely red-faced, and the flush even leaked down his neck and just below the open collar of his white shirt. Ismene tried not to laugh at his expense, covering a smirk with her hand and then putting her indifferent mask on for his benefit. For all that her own upbringing had been sheltered, she sometimes forgot that he was Chantry raised. A few moments where her chaperone had looked the other way had thoroughly disabused any notions Ismene had of other people's sense of propriety - and also deprived several of her suitors of their childbearing abilities, she could only assume.

But Alistair was blushing like a green soldier hearing his first curse word. Surely he’d _seen_ …

From the way Leliana was tilting her head speculatively, sat next to him, Ismene was pretty certain that, well… they _both_ had experience.

Thinking about what exactly the Orlesian approach to dismantling Alistair’s Chantry sensibilities would've been put Ismene in a bad mood. “Do you want another drink?” she asked, gesturing to Ali’s cup, eager to get away from the table. Alistair looked down at his empty drink, then up at her, and then very much did not look at the half-naked woman. His throat bobbed in a swallow, and he nodded.

“Not for me,” Leliana said with a small smile, that Ismene decided she didn’t need to read into as she strode up to the bar and ordered two more Sun Blonde Vints. She was watching the bartender pour them out when she noticed movement at the corner of her eye, and noticed that same auburn haired woman with the dress of dubious structural integrity standing right next to her. 

“I had… a question,” the whore said to her with a brilliant smile, leaning over the bar and officially rendering the neckline of her gown completely ineffective.

Ismene thought back to the way she’d been looking over at their table as she passed by, and replied flatly. “Alistair is in a relationship. No judgement on my part - I’d normally say that wasn’t an issue if all the parties are consenting in the matter - but he seems a little bit too… um… _Fereldan_ , for… you know... that.”

The woman blinked at her, twice, and then threw back her head and laughed. The sound was long and lyrical, and Iz was a little confused, because it hadn’t been that good of a joke. But she supposed laughing at bad jokes was one of the easiest things a prostitute was paid to do.

“Oh, sweetheart,” the woman said, dabbing delicately at the corners of her lashes to check her make-up hadn’t smudged. “I wasn’t asking you about your friend.”

“Oh?”

“I was more wondering about… you,” the woman said, placing a hand on the bare skin of Ismene’s forearm, where she had her shirt sleeves rolled up. “You just seem a little _tense_.”

It was Ismene’s turn to freeze up in confusion. 

It hadn’t actually crossed her mind that _she_ would get hit on in The Pearl - so used was she to being the Fortress of Highever, whose notorious frigidity preceded everything else about her. She also… well. She looked down at her hand. But her wedding ring wasn’t there - she’d been too worried about getting it lost in any battles they found themselves stumbling into to wear it on her finger. She kept it on a chain around her neck, under her shirt collar and against her heart.

The woman took in her floundering, startled prey response, and her expression softened in a way that it was quite clearly trained to do, to placate the nervous first-timers. Though her hand didn’t move from Izzy’s arm, the pressure lightened slightly. “I can get one of my friends, if you would like?” the woman said, gently. “One of my _male_ friends? If that’s more your-”

“No!” Iz said abruptly. The whore raised her eyebrows, and she quickly cleared her throat. “That is. No, thank you. To, um, any of it. Male or female or otherwise. I’m here for-” she jerked her head in the direction of Zevran’s conversation, “for a friend. Not to… um… partake.”

The woman eyed her up and down, and then shrugged, removing her hand with practiced ease and not an ounce of awkwardness. “Well, let me know if you change your mind," she cast one more speculative glance at Ismene, clearly designed to seduce those wavering on the precipice of accepting, then leaned in close, breath ghosting her ear. “You have wonderful... eyes.”

 _Huh_ , was all Ismene thought, as she picked up their new drinks and hastily moved away from the counter. She hadn’t really expected…

“What was that?” Alistair hissed harriedly, as she plonked their glasses down on the table in front of him.

“Oh,” Izzy said, blinking at him. “Well. I think I just got propositioned, honestly. Is it still propositioning? If they’re the ones offering a service, and I’m going to be the one who ends up paying?”

“I - you - _did you want to?!_ ”

Ismene blinked at him again, then cocked her head as she considered it. Honestly, no, she hadn’t wanted to. In the least. It wasn’t that the whore in question had been a woman. It wasn’t even that she was a whore. And it wasn't that Alistair was in the same room, apparently watching them, either. But Ismene just… she didn’t often feel that way, about people. She could tell that that woman was extremely pretty, and her breasts had honestly just been… impressive. It took a lot of confidence to wear a dress like that, and confidence was an extremely attractive trait. But Ismene wasn’t about to tumble with someone she’d never met and then dust off her hands and walk away afterwards. For one thing, she’d never tumbled anyone. And while The Pearl might be the most sensible educational setting in which to do so, she didn’t really feel like learning, tonight. She mostly just felt like getting drunk, and then trying to coax Alistair into singing some kind of war tune on their walk back, hopefully banishing thoughts of Goldanna from his mind. 

Honestly, she’d never really seen the appeal - at least, not in strangers.

She’d never really seen the appeal in a _lot_ of people. Not in young men with chiselled cheekbones, whose angles she admired like one admired the lines on a sculpture. Nor in the women that fluttered around court in their diaphanous dresses with their low cut necklines. She’d often wondered if the tales she’d spread of her frigidity had some truth in them but, really, it wasn’t that she lacked passion. Just that no one sparked it in her. It smouldered away within her, waiting, desperately, for someone - anyone - to have the unidentifiable skills it took to fan the flames. She’d had a few very heady daydreams about Ser Gilmore when she was really, really young, around fifteen and already four rejected proposals deep. But that was only after he’d been… nice. Mostly, to her dog.

And with Alistair... yes, she’d noticed he was pretty, tall, and very, _very_ muscly almost immediately... because she had eyes. And then she'd noticed he had the most adorable, endearing smile - just so effortless and unassuming. _He'd_ never needed tutors to teach him how to make himself likeable. 

But it wasn’t like there’d been all that much time to think more about it, when they were traipsing through the Korcari Wilds or running from darkspawn. It was only really when he’d started talking her through the dreams the taint gave them, and started shaking her awake and letting her join him on watch whenever he noticed she was struggling with nightmares that things changed. It was in those deep dark nights - as they’d talked about their lives before the Wardens while lit by the gloaming of the fire, and he’d startled her into a laugh and then startled her even further by laughing at things she said - that she’d started to wonder...

“I think that if she’d _wanted_ to, Alistair,” Leliana observed, bringing Iz back to the present and making her realise she hadn’t yet responded to his question, “she wouldn’t be sitting back down with us.”

"I told her I wasn't really interested," Izzy said hastily, with a shrug.

“Then… then why did she _ask you_?”

“It’s probably just the accent,” Ismene said dismissively. She patted her coin purse at her hip. “And the gold. She could probably tell I was a wealthy catch from a mile off.”

Leliana snorted, and Iz frowned at her. “I’m sorry,” the bard grinned, not looking sorry in the least. “But… have you _looked_ in a mirror? I’m sure the money was just a welcome bonus.”

Iz shifted awkwardly in her seat, and tugged a strand of dark hair behind her ear. She’d had many years of being reminded that her beauty was her greatest weapon and only worth, but from Leliana’s lips it sounded… light-hearted. Like a compliment. Not a reminder of her duty.

Opposite, Alistair started blushing again, and seemed very interested in his new drink.

“Are you sure, Zevran?" came a purring voice from behind Izzy's back. "Not even for old time’s sake?”

At the sound of voices Ismene looked over her shoulder, to see Zev walking back to their table, his dark-haired friend on his heels. If she’d thought the whore who’d propositioned her had good tits, they were entirely put to shame by this woman. Though honestly, Iz was more impressed with the pair of phenomenal boots Isabela wore, that climbed all the way beyond mid-thigh, and meant that she towered over Zev by several inches.

“Ah, Bela, you know I am tempted,” Zev sighed dramatically, like it was the greatest challenge he'd ever face. "But you see, under the Warden’s guidance, I am a changed man. I have a duty, and am currently trying to keep my friend here,” he clapped Alistair on the shoulder, “safe from the kinds of assassins that get in the way of kings and their crowns, or wardens and their archdemons. Perhaps another time, yes? We shall surely see each other again.”

“I shall hold you to that."

“I would surely despair, if you didn’t.”

“Not all that changed, then,” Ismene observed dryly from where she was sat.

“What can I say, darling Ismene?” Zevran glanced down at her and winked, “my one weakness has always been tempestuous, dark-haired women.”

“I know. I was there in that clearing, when I knocked you unconscious,” Izzy replied.

“That sounds… _fascinating_ , sweet thing,” said Isabela, whose eyes took on a predatory glint as they landed on her, and somehow managed to trail down her body despite the fact she was sat, mostly obscured by a table. “You should tell me _all about_ Zevran’s defeat at your hands. Possibly over a drink.”

“I’m… um… good, thank you,” Iz said, nervous politeness making her voice go a few octaves higher and far more posh. “Zevran is a far more accomplished storyteller than I. I’m sure he can tell you all about it himself.”

“And I’m sure you’re far, far more interesting than you’re letting on.”

“I fear our Warden is not for you, Isabela,” Zevran interrupted, regarding his friend with a single raised eyebrow. “No matter how much you might want to topple the Fortress of Highever.”

Iz first instinct was to bristle at the nickname, but then Isabela pouted, like she’d been caught red-handed in some kind of act, “oh Zev, you always ruin my fun! You and your lot shouldn’t post bounties on people’s maidenheads, if you don’t want me claiming them all. How else am I supposed to fund improvements to my ship?” 

While Ismene gaped at such a blatant and unrepentant admission, the pirate busied herself looking around The Pearl, before she threw up her hands, and in a raised voice announced: “I’m in a brothel, and already my advances have been rejected twice over! I think this might be an entirely new experience. Surely _someone_ here wants a fuck?”

A couple of men at the bar immediately looked interested. Opposite, Alistair squirmed in his seat, ears burning along with all his chantry sensibilities. 

And next to him, Leliana finished her last mouthful of liquor. Slammed her glass onto the table loud enough to capture everyone's attention. And replied, with a calm voice and a level stare directly at the pirate, “I think I could be persuaded.”

Ismene’s head snapped round, watching her friend with in further open-mouthed shock. Bela gave the redhead a single assessing glance, followed by a delighted chuckle. “Well then, darling girl, it’s lucky for us both that I can be very, _very_ persuasive, with very little effort,” she cocked a hip, and an eyebrow, exuding confidence. “Do you need another drink here? Or would you perhaps prefer the rum I have back in my cabin?”

Leliana gave a winning smile that was somehow just as stunningly confident. It was like watching a sexy battle of wills. “It’s been such a long time since I was at sea. I find myself missing it, quite a lot.”

“Oh, really? You’ll have to tell me more about that, my darling girl.”

Ismene watched, mouth still wide open and aghast, as Leliana immediately slid out of her chair, placed her cloak over her shoulders, and then led the other woman out without even a backwards glance. The entire thing took less than thirty seconds.

_Why didn’t Alistair stop them?_

“You might want to close your mouth, Ismene dearest,” Zevran murmured in her ear. He sounded thoroughly, _thoroughly_ amused. “You could catch flies.”

He clapped her on the back then moved over to the bar, where he was immediately approached by a very pretty dark-skinned man, who seemed within five seconds to be giving him the same salespitch Ismene had received from his colleague. That left Alistair and Ismene sat opposite each other, alone. She couldn't think of anything to say. She was still trying to think a single coherent thought - but honestly, she was just outright stunned.

“Did what I think happen just happen?” Ali hissed at her, leaning across the table. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course - the two women thing - and she was very pretty, I absolutely loved the… the bandana... but they literally _just met_ -”

“ _Why didn’t you say anything?!_ ” Iz hissed back, cutting across him. She was horrified.

“What could I say?” he replied, confused. “'Good luck'? _Bonne chance_? Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do - oh wait, I haven’t done anything, and I also don’t have any of your... relevant parts?”

“How could you just let her walk off like that? With _someone else_? To _have sex_?”

“Um, it’s not really a case of ‘letting’ her do anything,” he replied, looking very, very confused now. “I mean, Leliana’s a very, very grown woman. And who am I to stand in the way of true happiness?”

“Surely you get some say!” Ismene told him, indignant on his behalf, “she’s _your girlfriend!_ ”

Alistair blinked. Then blinked again. Then again.

“Um, noooooooo,” he said, uncertainty drawing out the word. “She’s not.”

“Yes she is!” this time it was Ismene’s turn to be confused. “...Isn’t she?”

“...Very much no. Not unless I missed a crucial memo.”

“But… I could swear that-”

“If something like that happened between us, I’d really rather hope she’d keep me informed and up-to-date on the matter. I also imagine it would come with a set of benefits,” then Alistair hastily back tracked, looking guilty, “that came out wrong. I don’t want any benefits from her at all, really! Not that I don’t think she’s a wonderful friend! She is! But we’re just not… I mean, you saw her type roughly thirty seconds ago, and I’m very much not that. There’s no way I could pull off those boots.”

“But she- you-”

“She’s not my type either!” Alistair continued hurriedly, “Just in case you wondered! I - um - don’t like redheads. I prefer… um… Never mind.”

“But… but… three months ago, after we left Redcliffe, you and her, you- This whole time, you were -”

“Wait a second…” Alistair interrupted her, watching her face warily as something seemingly clicked into place at his end as well. “All this time, you were married to me. But you thought that… that Lels and I were… y’know…?”

“Well,” Ismene cast her eyes down to the table, and mumbled, “it’s not like _she’s_ got a teyrnir. She's not eighth in line to the throne, either. And she’s _Orlesian_.”

Alistair looked… scandalised. “You thought I… You thought that she…"

"Political marriages usually entail mistresses, Alistair. I've been telling you that the whole time." 

"But you've... you’ve been sharing a bed with me! Last time I checked, it was only the two of us in there!”

Iz was blushing now, wishing the ground could swallow her whole. How could she - but she’d been so certain that - she’d seen them! She swore that they’d- 

But then… she’d never actually _asked_ -

“People visit other people’s bedrooms, Alistair,” she muttered, feeling like a misbehaving child receiving a punishment. “It’s not unfeasible that-”

“Andraste’s knickers, woman, when would I ever have _time_? Every waking hour I have, I spend with _you_!”

His voice had risen over the course of their conversation. After that exclamation, the rest of The Pearl fell silent, his final word echoing round the room. Of all the places to have a lovers' - she meant a _marital_ \- quarrel, why the fuck did it have to be a brothel? A couple of the whores whispered something amongst themselves, covering giggles delicately behind their hands. From the bar, Zevran was watching the two of them, glass in hand, like he was part of the audience for a very interesting, very gripping, and very melodramatic play, that had just reached its climax.

“You - you really thought I was in a relationship,” Alistair said, “with _Leliana_?”

“Well, I-”

“ _And you married me anyway?_ ”

“Of course I did. It just made sense!” her voice became more confident once she was back on the more stable ground provided by logic. “You need me to get the throne-”

“You didn’t care?”

“Of course I cared!” she threw back, feeling frazzled. “But who am I to tell you who you sleep with!? I’m not your keeper! You’re allowed to sleep with whoever you want!”

“Oh, am I?” he said, and for some reason he sounded even more hurt than before. He picked up his drink and downed it in one swallow.

“You can do whatever you want!” Iz said, a little desperately. “We… it’s not like we got married for _love_ , Alistair,”

Only now, things suddenly didn’t seem that certain, because Ismene _did_ love him. She’d kept their marriage professional for the sake of her own heart. For the sake of keeping it safe. Because Alistair loved Leliana, not her, and that was why she’d knocked that rose out of his hand -

Only… he didn’t love Leliana. Apparently.

 _Oh no_.

“I know we didn’t,” he replied, a little petulantly. His voice sounded very far away as everything Iz thought she knew began to fall away around her. “This is all just… politics.”

“Exactly,” she reached out for his arm across the table, “so I -”

“I’m heading back,” Alistair said, jerking out of his chair and beyond the reach of her grip. He walked away from the table, paused, stepped back towards her, avoiding her gaze. “Tell Zevran that if he doesn’t walk you home, I’ll kill him.”

And then he left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy new year, everyone! Have some drama to end 2020 on ;)
> 
> I don't know when I'll be posting the next chapter, bc 6 chapters in less than a week is just excessive. Probably next week sometime! It's all drafted so know that it will definitely be on its way to you soon.
> 
> Also, if you want to watch Zevran have his life ruined by a 'tempestuous, dark haired woman', please read my other DA:O fic xx


	7. Chapter Seven

It happened after she’d given him his mother’s amulet.

Ismene had wondered if he’d been about to kiss her, then, as she’d handed over the necklace. The pale reflective gem was painstakingly pieced back together, with only the thinnest of hairline cracks between the pieces, all work by another’s hands. Her chest had been pounding like she’d just gone through the Joining the second time, and could feel her heart trying to desperately pump the poison out and through her veins. She’d known what it meant, as her hands briefly touched his, passing it over. Friends gave each other gifts - maybe friends even gave each other mementos of each other’s dead parents that they found while idly rifling through the drawers of ungrateful guardians - but that had not been a friend moment. Alistair had pinned her with a look she’d never received from _anyone_ before, not even all those people attempting to trick her into love, and she’d thought, _maybe…_

But he hadn’t kissed her then. He’d barely been able to string a sentence together. And she had never initiated anything before. She'd been so focused on evasive manoeuvres, she didn't know what came after, when you let someone in and past your defences. She suddenly felt very young, and very sheltered. 

After two days, she became afraid she’d imagined the whole thing. Three days later, she saw something that made her convinced she had. 

It was on the fourth day that he approached her.

Eamon told them to meet him in Denerim. It was hanging over her like a dark fog. They’d had all the treaties by that point, but Ismene didn’t want to go back. She didn’t want to sit in the capital, negotiating with the nobles who’d all, at one point, tried to use her, either for themselves or their sons. So she suddenly got unbearably interested in everyone’s business, and began writing a long laundry lists of worthy tasks to keep them outside of the city walls. 

“Killing Morrigan’s mother sounds like a very worthwhile venture, and you know, she asked me so nicely,” she was telling Zevran across the campfire, while he looked unconvinced at the prospect of eight more weeks camping, in the Korcari Wilds, no less. “You’re an assassin! You _love_ killing things when strangers ask nicely! Surely-”

“-Um, Iz?”

Ismene looked over to see Alistair standing nearby, shifting nervously from foot to foot. “Yes?”

“Could I talk to you… for a minute?”

“Sure,” she said. Her voice was flat and emotionless, in a way that she hated because it hadn’t been deliberate. Normally, that was a tone she used to make other people feel small, but in this case it was the only thing holding her composure together. She desperately wanted to pretend that everything was normal.

She followed Alistair out into the darkness. From the corner of her eye, she saw Leliana walk up to the campfire and whisper something to Zevran with a conspiratorial smile, that made him chuckle. With her fall of red hair flashing copper in the firelight, she looked beautiful, and Ismene’s stomach was a cold ball of petty rage.

“So, what did you want to talk about?” she asked, though she was pretty sure she already knew. She just wanted it to be over with - Maker, she wanted the Calling to claim her right now.

“...Um. Hold out your hand.”

“...Ok?” she put it out, palm flat, and levelled an unimpressed glare at him.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, avoiding her eyes, swallowing nervously. And, in a parody of how she’d handed over his amulet, he placed a rose there.

That cold ball of petty rage grew to the point where she could taste bile in the back of her throat.

“It’s a rose.” she said, proud when her voice didn’t break.

“Very astutely deducted,” he replied, and then he chuckled nervously. “Can see why they made you leader of the Wardens, not me!”

An ugly part of her wanted to point out that it was his cowardice that had made that decision for them, but, Maker… she loved him. And she couldn’t -

“Is there a point to this?” she asked instead, quietly, trying to think of anything she could do to make this go any quicker. For him to just tell her, and then she could get on with her life, and practice not feeling things again, which had been so much easier in the past…

“Oh,” Alistair said, looking a little crestfallen, “don’t you-”

But Ismene couldn’t hear him, for all the blood roaring in her ears. 

For you see, the night before, when she’d been on watch with Morrigan, overthinking everything that had happened since the amulet, and debating whether to ask the apostate, _of all people_ , for relationship advice, she’d seen him. Alistair. 

With Leliana.

She’d seen him hand a rose over to her. Present it to her, before launching into a long speech. Rub his neck awkwardly, like he was confessing to some wrongdoing. And then Leliana had laughed and grinned, and clapped her hands together in delight, and then she’d launched herself at Alistair and wrapped him up in a hug-

Alistair was still speaking, now. But she couldn’t hear him. She was reliving that moment, when she’d finally managed to wrench her gaze away, and felt the wild pang of vertigo that heralded her first heartbreak. The pain hadn’t been in her gut - it hadn’t even been in her heart. It had been everywhere, radiating from the centre of her chest, ripping across her ribs, and snagging on every little vulnerable edge of her being that she’d forgotten to protect, ever since she met him.

“I just don’t really know what I’m supposed to do with this,” Izzy said, suddenly, cutting him off mid-sentence, whatever that sentence was. For the first time since she’d left Highever that night with Duncan, she pulled the Fortress of Highever disguise back into place, voice high and haughty. It felt familiar - it felt like protection. She’d liked her nickname for that reason - Fortress’ were after all, a safeguard from invasion. They kept you safe. They kept you from getting hurt. 

He stuttered, looking at her like she was a stranger. Maybe she was, to him. She wondered if he’d expected her to be happy for him, when he told her he was in a relationship with someone else. She wondered if it was bad that she couldn’t be. Wasn’t love supposed to be selfless? 

But Ismene wasn’t selfless. She never had been. Of course he would want Leliana, who laughed and sang and joked and believed in the just hand of the Maker. Not the quiet, awkward, angry girl with her shiny, brittle veneer, who’d barely shed a tear when her own parents died.

If she could survive Highever, Ismene knew she could survive this.

She dropped the rose into the dirt. 

“I don’t have time for flowers, Alistair,” she told him coldly. “So unless this news has something to do with the archdemon, I don’t see why you need to waste my time.”

Ismene wished she could say that she was unable to sleep after she returned from The Pearl. That she’d spent the night tossing and turning, re-evaluating every interaction between her and Alistair since she’d seen - or she guessed, _thought she’d seen_ \- him give Leliana the rose. 

But the truth was that her soldier’s training kicked in once again. After five minutes staring at the ceiling and wondering exactly when and what she’d misconstrued, she blacked out and was dead to the world.

When she woke up, the bed was still empty. She hadn’t seen Alistair since he’d stalked out of The Pearl. She supposed she should be relieved - how did one share a bed with a man who was both suddenly single and also one’s husband? But all she noticed was how cold and empty it was without him.

A long night’s sleep did at least mean she woke up with no hangover, and was in fine form for what lay ahead of her that day: an invite, for both her and Alistair, to a garden party hosted by the wife of Bann Sighard at her Denerim mansion. As Iz had predicted, saving Oswyn had got the family to throw their lot in with her and Alistair wholeheartedly. They were helping them to recirculate in society, and stake their claim on the throne ahead of the Landsmeet. 

Alistair and her didn’t speak a single word to each other on the carriage ride over. He couldn’t even look at her, his gaze pinned at the scenery outside while she sat there, awkwardly shifting and trying not to note how nice he looked wearing a deep, forest green coat that made his tawny skin seem gold. Instead, it was Anora who coached him, saying, “just talk about all the wonderful things you’ve stabbed. Nearly all the men that will be there were Cailan loyalists, and Maker knows that’s how _he_ won them over. Let Izzy handle the wives. I’ll try and take out the Old Guard.”

Turning up with the current Queen in tow, very vocally putting her support behind Teyrna Cousland instead of her own father, certainly caused a stir. But Ismene wasn’t sure how convincing a show they made. They arrived arm-in-arm, but Alistair broke his grip from her as immediately as he could, dropping her hand as if it burned him. He stalked into the fray of young noblemen without a backwards glance, moving directly away from her, and leaving her stranded and alone in the centre of the lawn.

Iz did not allow herself a moment to recalibrate. Ismene Cousland never looked nervous or lost at a party. Instead, she did what she’d always wanted to do at every other fucking gathering she’d suffered through: she walked directly to the buffet table. After years of suffering through corsets and diets, there was a perverse satisfaction in piling a plate high with only desserts.

“My goodness, Ismene,” came a high voice from her left that Iz, with a sinking feeling in her gut, recognised. She turned to see Leonie, first-born daughter of Bann Esmerelle of Amaranthine and bane of her adolescent existence, approaching with her gaggle of friends and her fiance, Ser Derren. The girl had always circled every social gathering like a shark, waiting for the first drop of blood in the water - and she foolishly seemed to think she’d found it. 

She gave Ismene’s figure and her plate the once over, “I was about to comment on just how much you’ve changed since last I saw you, but I guess we all know the reason now, don’t we!?”

Ismene looked down at herself, wondering exactly what Leonie was trying to achieve. The stupid girl was affianced to a local knight, while Ismene currently held claim to her teyrnir, and a contender to the throne. 

But, ignoring those facts, there were other plainer ones that still didn't work in Leonie's favour. Yes, Izzy was now tanned and about three or four stone heavier - that didn’t mean she was suddenly _ugly_. Particularly not when she’d been trussed up in a deep, burgundy red dress, that pushed all of her muscle back into appropriately 'womanly' proportions. She supposed that her shoulders were pretty broad these days, but there was nothing else she could detect that was unattractive. In fact, her cleavage was more impressive than it had frankly been in months. 

Anora had also insisted that wearing red clothes also necessitated red lipstick. Izzy only brought red lipstick out on rare occasions. With her colouring, it made her monstrously pretty.

“What can I say?” she replied blandly, plucking one of the pastries from her plate and chomping down on it in a single bite, eyes never leaving Leonie’s as if daring her to comment. “Slaughtering darkspawn has really built up an appetite over the past year.”

“Is it _true_ , then?” Leonie asked, pantomiming scandal, “you’ve been fighting, all this time? With your...” she glanced over in the direction of Alistair, “husband?”

Ismene frowned. “Your aunt fell at Ostagar, Leonie. Fighting is a thing that women often tend to do.”

“But you were always so… delicate,” Leonie replied, clearly still trying to angle for whatever insult she’d been aiming for in the first place. “I’ve always felt like women who are admirable are also ladylike, don’t you agree? Like… _Queen Anora_ for instance. Her delicate touch counterbalanced her husband well, when he was on the throne. She was a person I trusted to guide the country... sensibly.”

Ismene snorted. Leonie did a double take, looking affronted - as well she should - but Iz had been unable to stop herself. 

It was the kind of slip-up she never would’ve made as Eleanor Cousland’s daughter. _Oh well,_ she thought - she was done pretending to be anything other than what she was, this time round. “If you ever thought there was anything ‘delicate’ about Anora or I, Leonie, then you clearly don’t know either of us very well.”

While Leonie stood there, seething indignantly, Ismene rifled through her plate of confectionary and plucked a honey sticky strawberry from the top of one of the tarts. Satisfied, she popped it in her mouth.

As she was gleefully licking her fingers clean with theatrical enthusiasm, she caught Alistair watching her from across the room, where he was standing with a group of nobles from the Waking Sea. As soon as their gazes snagged, he startled and looked away. She might’ve been imagining things, but even at this distance his ears looked bright red. 

… _Was_ she imagining things?

“What’s the new Theirin like, Ismene?” Iz startled out of her daze to see Habran Bryland, one of Leonie’s entourage, staring up at her with the kind of look that told her she wasn’t asking out of politeness. _Bollocks_. This, at least, was someone she couldn’t be rude to - the Brylands were related to the Howes, and slitting the Arl’s throat last week meant she’d probably used up her quota of impoliteness for the next year, at least.

“Don’t be silly, Habran,” Leonie said, regaining her composure, and it was then that Ismene realised that one of her faithful pups had been throwing down the gauntlet for a new round of insult. “He’s not a Theirin, he’s some kitchen wench’s get, and _she_ doesn’t know - she’s just using him for a chance at the throne.”

“Arl Eamon is the one who verified Alistair’s bloodline, not I,” Ismene replied calmly, the argument well rehearsed by this point. “If you wish to throw doubt on his relationship to Marric, and question Redcliffe’s honour-”

“Tell me, did the Arl verify the boy’s bloodline before or _after_ you decided to use him as your puppet?”

“Or before or _after_ you walked into a respectable man’s house, and murdered everyone there with all the finesse of a wild animal?” Habran continued, with a disdainful look.

“To be frank, I was only following the standards Howe set himself, at Highever,” Ismene retorted.

“If you really did bag a Theirin, that’s actually quite an astute political move, Izzy,” said Ser Derren, while Iz fought the urge to grimace at his use of a nickname. She’d spoken to the man possibly three times, and he hadn’t even been on her mother’s list of marriage candidates, which was really, _really_ saying something. “I’m beginning to see why you survived the Blight, and Fergus didn’t.”

Ismene was herself _beginning_ to feel that reckless anger build up behind her facade - the kind of anger that led her to wonder whether or not she could knock Derren unconscious in thirty seconds or less, these days. These people really had no idea who they were dealing with. She supposed showing up with a massacred house, a new taste for violence, and a bastard husband might give people the impression she was in a less secure place than she had been a year ago. When the truth was, she was stronger than ever before.

She simply gave Leonie, no doubt the mastermind of this pointless interrogation, her most beatific smile, that she was spitefully pleased to see left Ser Derren a little dazed. “He _is_ a Theirin, Ser Derren, unless you too would like to question Arl Eamon on his word,” she said. “And to answer your question, Leonie, it was actually _after_ we decided to get married that I discovered that the _Fereldan throne_ is Alistair’s birthright. I married him for love, not a crown. Our decision to stand in contention to Loghain’s claim is merely a reflection of his own tyranny. It has reached the point where he is incapable of running the country, as Anora’s support for our bid is a testament to.”

This time, Leonie scoffed. The sound was far more dainty than Iz’s snort. “Ahh yes, so clearly a love match, when the man can’t stand being next to you for more than thirty seconds, even in public. But then, you always _did_ know how to make yourself hateful to the opposite sex, didn’t you, Ismene? All those dresses and lessons your mother sunk your fortune into, and it couldn’t hide your personality for more than a night. That poor country bumpkin you’ve ensnared must already feel so very _trapped_ -”

“Oh yes. Truly, the terrible depths of this cruel, cruel fate keep me awake _every night_ ,” came a dry, deadpan voice from Ismene’s shoulder.

She looked up in surprise, to see Alistair suddenly standing next to her. He looked down at her, and with a wink, continued, “I beg you this very second to release me, you horrible, wicked harpy! I cannot weather even another day of being married to the strongest, most talented, and most beautiful woman in all of Ferelden! It’s a fate worse than death, I tell you! I’d take a legion of darkspawn any day, but you keep slaughtering them all before I can even get close! Don’t you dare menace me with your cunning wiles, don't you dare! I don’t think my heart could take it!”

Iz was pretty sure she was blushing, and Leonie was watching open-mouthed, which made it all the more mortifying, because she was certain she’d never blushed in front of any acquaintance, ever. “Alistair, you’re being silly,” she said, valiantly trying to keep her voice steady. “Have a cookie.”

And then, without much thought beyond the hope it might shut him up, she shoved one at his face. Luckily (or unluckily, completely horrifyingly, perhaps, she was absolutely not prepared) the one thing Alistair did know how to do was improvise. He graciously (or ungraciously, did people do these kinds of things _in public_? Really?) ate it from her fingers, holding her gaze the entire time, until it became the most intimate thing she'd ever done with another human being. Then, he captured her outstretched hand and planted a soft, open-mouthed kiss on the heel of her palm.

Ismene jumped, at the unexpected lance of electricity that ran all the way through her at that barest moment of contact.

This had very much backfired.

“You know she’s going to keep me locked in a basement, after the coronation?” Ali confided in Leonie, still holding onto Ismene’s hand while she desperately tried to will her brain back to a functional state. “Not for any nefarious purposes, you understand - purely for very, very sexy ones.”

“ _Alistair!_ ” Ismene squawked.

“Yes, darling? Dearest? Love muffin? Sugar plum?”

“Don’t… don’t you have something to-”

“-Oh yes, snuggle-bunch. Well, you see, I was speaking to Bann Lanya, who offered to pledge her men in the fight against that pesky archdemon. But being the ‘poor country bumpkin’ I am, I was explaining that we were already having difficulty working out where to house all of our Dalish fighters, the Circle mages, and then King Bhelen’s men, even once we move into the Castle,” he looked at Leonie again, and gave her a blinding winning smile, that left _her_ a little dazed. “Did you know that my brilliant wife is the first woman in history to unite all of Ferelden’s armed factions under one banner? Truly, I cannot wait to see what she is capable of when she is Queen. Any _sensible person_ would probably want to stay on her good side.”

“Oh,” Leonie said, quietly. All of her entourage were looking a little nonplussed at this point.

“So, snookums,” Alistair continued. “Snowflake. Cinnamon bun. Light of my life. Would you mind accompanying me for a second to discuss the logistics? Or do you want us to stay with these delightful people, while I regale them with the tales of our sordid love life, and all the people you’ve murdered with your bare hands?”

“I think we can... go,” Ismene said faintly, wondering if the desserts on her plate had been spiked with something.

Alistair took her hand, and began dragging her away from the group at the buffet table. Ismene followed him blindly, until she realised he was making a beeline for the hedge maze that was the obnoxious party piece of Bann Sighard’s estate. “Bann Lanya is over there,” she pointed out weakly, looking over towards where the muscled woman in her late forties was talking and laughing heartily with her soldiers.

“Yes, well, she’s already agreed to give me the men, so I was just making an excuse,” Alistair told her, not slowing down in the slightest. “You were doing that face you do.”

“What face?”

“You know, the ‘I’m smiling at you like I love you, because inside I want to stab you through the eye’ smile.”

“That’s… that’s just my polite smile!”

“It isn’t, and you know it.” She did know it, but she was unreasonably terrified that he did too. “What were they saying?”

“Mean things. That’s what the nobility do.”

She watched the side of his profile as he pulled her deeper into the maze. His hair had been styled when they arrived in an effort to make him presentable, but he’d clearly forgotten about the fact, because now it was in rumpled disarray as if he’d been running his hands through it. Not that he still didn’t look presentable. But he also looked… tired. Like he’d been awake all night.

“Why didn’t you tell her to fuck off?” he asked her, not slowing down. “She was _awful_. Surely she realises that all that ‘Fortress’ stuff was deliberate?”

“I guess if she’d ever had as many suitors as I did, she would’ve known what to do with them,” Ismene murmured, casting a glance back to the party that they really shouldn’t be walking away from. “Leonie’s such a bitch naturally, it would irk her no end if she knew my personality was all performance.”

“It is, isn’t it? A performance. You deliberately make all those people hate you.” Alistair sighed. “Maker, _why?_ ”

“It’s just what I did to survive,” she replied with a shrug, “I’d have downed the darkspawn taint at ten if I’d known it would get me out. Alistair, we really should go back-”

“Why did you marry me?” he asked, suddenly, as he blindly tugged her round another corner in the maze, then pulled them both short when it resulted in a dead end. “Was that to survive, as well?”

Ismene frowned, and tried to tug her hand back from him, but he held it fast. “You know why,” she replied, looking to the ground, “you’re going to be an amazing king, but you need me to get there.”

“Why?” he said, seemingly frustrated. “Why would I make a good king?”

“Well… because… because you’re a good person. You’re a leader, even when you think you’re not. You’ve always served people out of duty, but you’ve never been in a place where you could make that much of a difference. I can give that to you. You’d make Ferelden better, I know you would. You’re not…” she bit her lip, and then continued, “you’re not like me. You’re humble, and you’re selfless. You protect people. You’re sincere, and you sincerely care about people. You don’t act a certain way because you think it’ll keep you safe. People will trust you, and you’ll use that trust for good things, and-”

“- _I’m_ selfless, but you’ll, what? You’ll commit to being miserable the rest of your life, suffering horrible people saying cruel things about the two of us-”

“- I mean, they’d be really stupid to keep doing that, if we _do_ take the throne-”

“- on the off-chance I’d make a good king? You don’t even want to be Queen!” Alistair cried, then lowered his voice guiltily without prompting. “You thought I was _sleeping with someone else_! Why would you put yourself through a loveless marriage for no reward, if you hate this-” he gestured around, and she assumed she meant the nobility, not hedge mazes, “-enough that downing darkspawn blood and dying at forty seems to you like it’s the better option? You don’t _have_ to be here. I’m not going to put you through this for _my_ sake-”

“-Because I get to stay with you!”

Ismene’s own voice had risen in volume to match his. In the silence that followed her proclamation both of their breathing was ragged. Alistair’s mouth was open, but whatever retort he’d been about to give had died on his lips.

Iz had said the wrong thing, so she hastily tried to recover the situation. “Do you know the kind of men my mother tried to marry me to?” she told him. “They were horrible. They _liked_ the Fortress thing. They liked the challenge, or they liked me being the silent, cowed version of myself that my mother created. They wanted the porcelain doll version of me. You’re not like that. You’ve only ever known who I really am, and you never tried to change anything. You make me laugh. You’re my best friend. We work well together. We have fun. You’re more than I ever hoped for, honestly. Being on the throne won’t be so bad, if it’s with you…”

Alistair was looking at her like she’d grown a second head. She trailed off, realising that her damage control hadn’t actually done much to mitigate the original confession. Instead, she was just digging herself into a much, much deeper hole. She stuttered, and then, horrified, felt a blush rising up through her shoulders, to burn at her cheeks.

“You… wanted to stay, with _me_? ...Even though you thought I was with Leliana?”

“I guess,” Ismene said, hating the sound of her own voice, as she began to scuff a foot along the ground. She was still holding her plate of desserts, like a fucking lemon, and he was still holding her other hand, and that meant there wasn’t anything she could do but avoid his gaze and hope this mortifying moment would end. “I mean… you’re all I have. And I want you to be _happy_ , Alistair. That’s not exactly an awful fate for me, you understand? I’m not going to stand in the way of who you - who you love, that’s not my right, I-”

Izzy stopped speaking as Alistair let go of her hand. He plucked the plate from her grasp, and deposited it on the grass very gently, careful not to let any of the pastries spill. She blinked at him, confused. “What are you-”

“Possibly something very, very stupid,” he informed her, as he straightened back up, and brushed invisible dust from his shirt, like he was psyching himself up for something. “Honestly, it all depends on which one of us has been more of a fool: you or me. And let’s be frank, it’s usually me, so the odds really are not in my favour.”

“I… I don’t understand-”

And then, he kissed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, do you know how hard it was to write the rose scene being derailed??! Ismene didn't even get to put it in her inventory 😭😭
> 
> Also, I swear I wrote this entire chapter way before Bridgerton came out on Netflix, but here we are, with so many cinematic parallels it's actually vaguely worrying. This scene was mostly inspired by Emma (2020), for reasons that are completely understandable.
> 
> Leonie is a fake noblewoman, but all other named nobles are from the wonderful 'Fereldan royalty and nobility' wiki-page.


	8. Chapter Eight

Ismene locked up as Alistair stepped in closer, close enough that suddenly he fell out of focus. And then she blinked, and he was back, and he was leaning in closer still. So close she could count each one of his coppery eyelashes. She had enough time for a single intelligent thought: _what?_

And suddenly he was kissing her.

Like the kiss inside the Chantry at their wedding ceremony, it was a very gentle affair. His mouth was warm and dry, and held just the barest pressure. And like last time, the gentleness in the gesture did not correspond to the violence of Ismene’s reaction. A thrill rose up through her toes, sweeping up and through the rest of her body, overturning her stomach with a rush of vertigo. Her eyelids fluttered shut as she surrendered to the visceral force that first contact assailed her with. She could taste her heartbeat in her lips - or maybe it was his. 

Alistair reached up one hand to cradle her jaw. The other stroked across her cheek, before he buried his fingers deep into the dark waves of her hair. The sound Iz made at the feeling was just… embarrassing. A pleased hum, that transformed into an almost wounded noise, as she struggled to process the overwhelming sensation. Unsure of what to do, her hands were limp at her sides. Her lips parted with a sigh, and she tasted the barest hint of sugar from his mouth on the tip of her tongue, from the cookie he’d eaten from her fingers.

She wanted more.

It seemed Alistair did too. His lips also parted, and as his tongue delved into her mouth he took another step towards her. All distance vanished between them, and all she could feel was the warm, hard planes of his muscled body against hers. She was a head or so shorter than him, so she had to arch herself for them to stay connected, pressing her even closer. She didn't mind being at a disadvantage. 

She was melting. She felt soft. She’d never felt soft.

He bit down lightly on her bottom lip, and she startled under his hands, letting out a gasp.

Alistair startled too, and broke away from her all of a sudden. The colour was high in his cheeks, warming the already warm tone of his skin, and his breathing was harried. He looked down at her like she’d materialised from thin air, as if he was equally surprised to find themselves in this position even though he was the one who'd gotten them there. 

“Sorry!” he said guiltily, gasping. “Sorry! I probably should’ve asked! But then you know, I said the line, and it was a really good line, and-”

Ismene blinked up at him, incredulous and actually a little affronted. He might have thought that was a bad gasp, but it was a good gasp. A very very good gasp. _Why the fuck had he stopped?_

Alistair was still babbling, eyes dark with desire and looking anywhere but at her mouth, but she couldn’t really hear him over the pounding of her blood in her ears. Iz suddenly understood what to do with the hands dangling uselessly at her sides: she reached up, grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt, and dragged him back down to her.

“- and you know, you shouldn’t wear red, you should be banned from wearing red, it is really quite unfair and I mean… _mmmpf!_ ”

Ismene smashed her mouth inelegantly across his mid-sentence, possibly with a little too much aggression. It was about as messy and foolish as she expected the first kiss she ever initiated to be. But Ali quickly got the message, hastily rearranging them both into a more comfortable position and meeting her enthusiasm with his own. This time, she was the one to bite down on his lip - if that was a thing people did, she was _absolutely on board_. And when he groaned in response, she wrapped her arms around his neck and tugged him down, pulled him even closer - convinced that there must be some way to ensure there was no space between them whatsoever.

She didn’t quite know how to handle the onslaught of sensation. She’d read books of course, and idly considered chasing after the passionate whirlwind of emotions described therein, but she’d never expected it to… happen. She’d never expected a kiss to feel this way, not for her, and she knew it was because it was with him. Because it was _his_ heartbeat hammering in time with hers, _his_ hands in her hair, _his_ warm body shuddering under her touch.

“Oh! _Oh_ ,” Alistair murmured against her lips, when she untucked his shirt at the waistline and inched her hands underneath. They glided their way across warm, smooth skin, feeling arching planes of tight muscle jump beneath her touch.

“I can… stop…?” Izzy mumbled, ashamed of how unconvincing her voice sounded. She reached up to dig her nails lightly into the meat of his shoulderblades, and he groaned again.

“No?!” he hastily replied in a high-pitched voice, before clearing his throat. “No, I’m good. So, so… oh, _Maker_ … very good. Grand!” 

Ismene wasn’t quite sure if he pulled her, or if she pushed him, or if their knees just gave out by mutual agreement. But between one breath and the next, they were suddenly crumpled together in a heap on the grass. She was sprawled in his lap, hovering above him with legs tangled in disarray, and it meant that she was now slightly _taller_ than him, which made her feel almost… dizzy. He was so close, and so _pretty_ , and the look on his face was unlike any she’d ever seen.

Their new position also meant that parts of them were pressing together that hadn’t been before, and -

“Sorry!” Alistair said quickly, as they both became very conscious of something. His shirt was mangled, his chest was heaving with exertion, and he had crimson lipstick smudged all around his mouth in a comically wide stain, leading Ismene to have certain questions about her own technique. 

“Why are you sorry?” she asked, genuinely curious even as heat thrummed through her body in response.

“ _Um…_ ” he gave her an uncertain look, like he was expecting to somehow be caught out in a trick question. So she decided to make her thoughts on the matter perfectly, crystal clear - by rearranging herself fully in his lap, knees either side of his hips, skirts bunching up around the both of them. She leant all her weight into him - _onto_ him. His breath left him in one big gust, like she’d stabbed him straight through the gut, and it was enough for her to bury her fingers in his hair and start kissing him again.

Ismene lost track of time, as pins began to fall from her hair and she started working at shirt buttons even though she knew there was no way their endgame was going to be the traditional one. Even drunk on the power of this new feeling and novel new angle, it was all just… exploratory. It wasn’t like she could lose her maidenhead in Bann Sighard’s garden, in broad daylight no less. As much as she’d like to guide Alistair to her corset laces and get him to do something about them. 

They found a way to have fun, while bearing that knowledge in mind. Izzy thought the sounds might be the most fun part - playing his body like an instrument. Particularly when his groans hit a particularly low register, like she'd wounded him - indelibly marked him - and it thrummed all the way across her skin, leaving goosebumps in its wake. She didn’t want the moment to end. 

Her head was thrown back, Alistair’s lips were at her neck, and his hand was resting on her bared knee, just close enough to where she was about to urge it higher out of frustration, when suddenly she heard a gasp that didn’t belong to either of them.

“Oh, my _goodness_!” came Leonie of Amaranthine’s voice, scandalised and vehemently delighted in equal measure.

Ismene eyes snapped open in horror, to see Alistair looking up at her with a similarly guilty expression. 

And then she turned her head reluctantly in the direction of the sound. 

In their prolonged absence, it seemed that Anora and half Bann Sighard’s guests had entered the maze in search of them. 

And... well... they'd found them!

If anyone had ever been in doubt of the motivations behind the Cousland/Theirin marriage, they weren’t now. By the end of the week, a new song called ‘The Fortress Besieged’ was making its rounds in Denerim taverns. The territory of Highever, it proclaimed, had been gloriously claimed. With the one teyrnir conquered, it argued, it was clearly only a matter of time before Gwaren fell to the new, young, _virile_ King Alistair.

Zevran knew all of the lyrics off by heart, and Leliana was halfway through translating them gleefully into Orlesian. 

Because, Ismene quickly realised, her friends were absolutely _evil_.

She was, however, finding it hard to care.

Each morning, she woke up and dressed before Alistair knocked at her door. They shared a kiss at the threshold to her room, and then walked down the stairs to breakfast together, hand-in-hand. He slept in his bedroom now, and had done every night since their argument at The Pearl. Even though the reason for him not wanting to share a bed was now blatantly obvious - that is, he wanted to _far too much_ \- Iz found that she missed it. She wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about sex - even sex where both parties were sterile, so there was no possible consequences - but she found that she missed having him closeby. The two things - tumbling into bed with him and waking up alongside him - were different in her own mind. One was about the desire, the other intimacy. 

Even though the errant thought of them being alone in a bedroom now had the added effect of setting her skin alight regardless of when and where it popped into her head.

Acting like a married couple had become magnificently easy. They trained together, and when she felled him to the ground she laughed and tumbled down after him, pressing him into the dirt of the yard and smothering his face in kisses while the servants looked on and whispered amongst themselves. They kissed in the marketplace, and each embrace left her smiling like a fool. They attended meetings with nobles throughout the city, securing their favour in preparation for the Landsmeet, and all the men she had rejected now pasted smiles on their faces while their eyes were wide with fascination and horror, constantly pinned on their intertwined hands, and the rings that glinted there side by side.

Time raced by. Ismene was uncertain whether she had ever been so deliciously, deliriously happy. It became hard to think of the Landsmeet as something to be afraid of. Honestly, it became hard to think of anything other than the next time she’d see Alistair’s face. Even the archdemon felt like it was very, very far away.

When Eamonn summoned them to his office and announced that he felt like all the pieces had fallen into place and that he planned to call the Landsmeet the next day, it came as a shock. 

One that necessitated alcohol.

“Wait, you really thought he was with _me_?” Leliana said incredulously that evening, when they were two bottles of wine deep and Alistair was being reduced to a blushing mess by whatever advice or interrogation Zevran was subjecting him to at the other end of the room. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t understand the appeal - trust me, I very much do! But he’s been sweet on you for ages! Do you not remember when you asked him who his first love was, in the Brecilian Forest, and he couldn’t string a sentence together for the next five minutes?!”

“I… I saw him hand you a rose,” Izzy told her, shifting awkwardly in her seat, “I thought-”

“Oh no! Oh, goodness!” Leliana looked horrified. “That was… he was asking me if I thought it made a good confession. He’d been practising, and he wanted advice! The poor boy was a little terrified of you.”

“Oh,” said Iz, mortified. “Oh, dear.” 

“So _that’s_ why you stamped on that rose-”

“-I didn’t stamp on it!”

“I nearly told you off for that, you know,” Leliana told her, seriously. “You broke his poor heart. I had to coach him through it for days which… oh dear… now that I think about it...”

“I just wanted to offer my congratulations on a job well done,” was Morrigan’s addition to the conversation, as she swirled her wine in her glass and smirked. 

“Oh well,” Leliana said with a smile, “thank goodness all of that is sorted out now. I was _this close_ to just locking you two in a room together.”

“They walked out of a Chantry hand-in-hand, and still it didn’t occur to them,” Anora pointed out, dryly. “It probably would’ve taken a little more than that.”

“I don’t know,” Wynne smiled, “I’ve seen what confinement does to young people and their hormones - you’d be surprised what kind of effect it has on people.”

“Speaking of, have you…” Leliana trailed off, waggling her eyebrows at Ismene.

“Have I… what?” she replied, with practiced nonchalance.

“A lot of romance novels talk about the stamina of Grey Wardens, I want to know how much of it is true…”

“Oh please. Look at him,” Morrigan said, gesturing over to where both Zevran and Oghren - and, it seemed, _Sten_ \- were now raking Alistair over the coals. “The boy is quite clearly a virgin.”

“ _Morrigan!_ ”

“What?” the apostate asked, to the air, “...am I wrong?”

“I was rather under the impression he lost it in that garden,” said Anora.

“Anora! You were there! We weren’t-”

By the end of the night, the two of them were as red as each other. Izzy tried to tell herself it was from the wine, but it didn’t help matters when they left the room hand-in-hand to a chorus of cheers and applause. Even _Wynne_ joined in, Andraste preserve them. 

“I think perhaps,” Ismene said, as they unsteadily ascended the stairs, “that living all together in one house… was a mistake.”

“At least we have _walls_ , here,” he pointed out, “can you imagine if we were conducting all of this through tent canvas? We’d never hear the end of it. Neither would they!"

“All of… what?” she said, raising an eyebrow and watching the tips of his ears burn.

“Never mind! Forget I said anything!”

She laughed, and stopped him on the stair, wrapping her arm around his waist and pulling him to her mouth for a kiss. When her hand slipped down lower to his backside and squeezed, he yelped.

“Yes,” she said, grinning as she pulled back, “what an embarrassing noise to be heard making, in public.”

“I think you might be evil,” he informed her, very seriously. “I’m not complaining, you understand. But I’d rather be informed ahead of time, particularly if you have any sinister machinations up your sleeve. I’d have a slight crisis of conscience if I _unknowingly_ put a villainess on the throne of Ferelden.”

“I have plans for some very, _very_ sinister machinations,” she told him, leaning up on tiptoe and kissing his cheek. Then she leaned further and whispered in his ear, “but all of them will be conducted in private. I promise.”

He shuddered under her hands, “I… how are you so good at this?”

“Good at... what?” she asked innocently.

“Evil. Definitely evil,” he muttered to himself, and then planted a kiss right on the tip of her nose.

It was all tiddly jokes and tipsy kisses as they climbed the two floors up to their quarters, but both of them fell silent when they approached her door, as if suddenly their actions had more weight. The Landsmeet was tomorrow. It wasn’t so much that that Ismene feared - she was pretty certain they’d secured a court majority, and regardless of how people felt about Alistair or her, they would be unlikely to support a monarch who had spurned Orlais, but was working with Tevinter. The evidence they had against Loghain was truly damning, and the problem with getting by on an unblemished set of morals was that, the moment you deviated from them, you were done for.

It was what came… after, that worried Izzy. A life side-by-side with Alistair, but also a life of being bound by stone walls and responsibility. She could feel the weight of the crown on her head as if it was already there. She would be lying if she said it didn’t still fill her with dread.

“We’ll get through it,” Alistair said suddenly, squeezing her hand. Ismene startled from her reverie, wondering if she’d accidentally said any of her thoughts out loud. But no - he’d simply read them plain and simple on her face, in that scary way he was now capable of doing. 

“I’ll keep you safe,” he promised, leaning down to tuck a curl behind her ear. “Not from the archdemon - I know you’d kill me if I got there first. But from… everything else. We’ll get through it, together.”

Emotion welled up in her chest. The dread was still there - it didn’t magically disappear - but it was overwhelmed by that other feeling. Drowned out until there was no room for it apart from a tiny, hemmed in corner of pessimism. The rest of her felt deliriously happy again. Looking at Alistair, she wanted to hold onto him and never let him go.

“I love you,” she told him, at the threshold to her bedroom.

He looked surprised, like he hadn’t expected the words from her yet. But Izzy was remembering what Leliana told her - she’d been the one to interrupt his confession, all those months ago. He’d loved her first. If Ismene had dared let herself be vulnerable, risking injury in that moment and not giving into her tendency to think the worst of people, how different would things be now? 

That was her mistake, and it was up to her to fix it.

“I love you,” she repeated, willing him to believe it. “Meeting you was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’d do it all again - archdemons, ogres, Maker, even broodmothers. Because I got to do it with you.”

By this point, he had a ridiculous grin on his face, as he reached up to cradle her cheek. “Even the camping in the middle of nowhere?”

“Even _stream baths in the Frostbacks_.”

“Goodness, you must love me a lot then.”

“Indeed, I must.”

“Thank the Maker,” he murmured, stroking her cheek and pressing her ever so slightly into the door frame. “Because I find myself terrifyingly, indecently in love with you, as well. It would’ve just been embarrassing if you didn’t feel the same way. Morrigan would never let me hear the end of it.”

She smiled, heart aglow, and he blinked, stunned, before leaning forward to press his forehead against hers for a silent (and still slightly tipsy) moment. “Maker’s breath, but you are beautiful,” he murmured, “my _wife_. I’m a lucky man.” 

Ismene closed the distance without a word, and pressed her mouth against his. A gentle press, one shared breath with mouths millimeters apart, then again, deeper. More. She leant back into the door frame and pulled him with her, gathering him up in her arms and crushing him against her body. Her mouth opened to his. Every kiss they’d shared had felt like a test of limits, mouth curious and questioning and every new sound a revelation. 

It wasn’t a question of being scared, it never had been - it had been about savouring. And now, she knew that it was time.

 _I trust you,_ she said, as she anchored her hands in his hair. _I love you,_ as her tongue tangled with his, and she let his hands quest under her shirt.

She blindly reached behind her with one hand to find the door handle, and snicked it open. The sound was tiny, but it was enough that Alistair broke away from her, breathing heavily. He looked from her face, open and trusting, to the sliver of her bedroom just visible beyond the door as it began to inch open.

“Stay,” she whispered. 

And he did.


	9. Chapter Nine

Alistair woke up to a sunbeam lancing across his vision. That was what finally interrupted the best night’s sleep of his life.

He cracked one eye open, and smiled. Ismene was sprawled across his chest, snoring softly. Her face was snuggled into the crook of his shoulder, with her lips a soft, damp indent on his collarbone, and the rest of her pale bare skin pressed maddeningly against his, all soft and warm. This time, it wasn’t a surprise to find her there. She’d gone to sleep like that, just plastered herself across him like she was afraid he might be stupid enough to leave, and not moved an inch the entire night. He pulled the covers up over one of her shoulders that had become exposed sometime in the night, kissing the whorl of scar tissue left from when she’d been picked up by an ogre in the Deep Roads. Once, she would’ve been smooth and unblemished all over. Now, she was covered in scars, but he knew the story behind every single one of them.

Stroking a hand through the dark mantle of her hair and teasing out the tangles while he watched her sleep, he wondered if he’d ever been this happy. This was all he wanted from life. Nothing more than this. No crown, no fanfare, no hero’s glory. Just her, with him, waking up slow and lazily to a peaceful day with nothing to worry about. No treaties, no nightmares of archdemons, no darkspawn, no-

“Oh, shit!” he said, loud enough to cause Izzy to stir with a sleepy grumble of complaint.

Today was the Landsmeet.

Honestly, it had completely slipped his mind.

“Is that really necessary?” he asked, as the servant presented Ismene with her reflection and she tilted her head from side to side to examine herself. Her dark hair had been plaited and styled into a severely neat crown around her head, threaded through with gold wire to secure its structure. 

“Honestly, it might be,” she sighed, standing up in her chain shirt and leggings. “Seeing me in armour is already going to raise some eyebrows, I need to look the part as much as possible.”

“But isn’t it all going to be hidden under a helmet anyway?”

“I can’t wear a helmet! I need to look pretty! Besides, you don’t want people thinking they’re cheering you on, and then getting me instead. They’ll feel silly afterwards," Ismene sighed. "You’re the man, you get to wear the helmet.”

“But - we’re going to be attacked, aren’t we?”

“Are we?” Anora asked, mildly, as she came over, carrying a hulking section of Izzy’s armour and grimacing under the weight. She’d insisted, for some reason unknown to Alistair, on learning how to put it on correctly. He guessed the intricate rituals around girls getting ready for parties together extended to when the parties in question necessitated full plate.

“We probably are, Goldie,” Izzy pointed out, gently.

“But isn’t this all just… silly?” he asked, throwing up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong, you look lovely! But it won’t make a difference when Loghain tries to stab us - a helmet would!”

Anora and Ismene shared a significant look, that he had a feeling he was probably going to need to get used to. “Welcome to the life of a noblewoman,” his wife told him, dryly.

Eamon and his men were waiting for them in the grounds of the estate, as were the rest of their party. Alistair wondered idly whether this would be the first Ferelden parliament to have a Qunari, a golem, and the newest Witch of Wilds in attendance.Everyone was armed to the teeth. Zevran had a grand total of twelve daggers strapped to his person, which Alistair couldn’t help but think was overkill.

“Are you ready?” Izzy asked, glancing over at him. Ali jumped mid thought about Zevran, daggers, and overcompensation, to realise that they were… well, _all_ looking at him. All of their party, who had followed Iz until this point, and all of Eamon’s men as well. 

That was the way it would be, for every moment after this one. Even though Ismene was by far the more competent one, he was the man - for the people who cared about that sort of thing. And for the ones who didn’t: he was the one with Theirin blood. He would be expected to lead, from here on out.

Ali tried, very hard, not to have a panic attack. Ismene gave him one of her small, private smiles, clearly trying to reassure him. 

The streets of Denerim were lined with commoners, all hoping to catch a glance of their new heroic farm boy King, and his powerful, beautiful wife. They couldn’t take each other’s hand when ensconced in this much armour, but they could walk side by side in step with each other, as they and their delegation strode up to the castle. On the battlements, he swore he saw a dark haired, pale blur of a head, and all his nerves were suddenly wiped out by a wave of hatred: for the man who’d killed his brother, and the only father he’d ever truly known.

“Alfstanna, Bryland, Sighard, and Wulff will all be on our side,” Izzy told him in a rush, for what must’ve been the fiftieth time, but the rehearsal seemed to calm her nerves as much as they did his. “If we mention Jowan _and_ Tevinter, I reckon we can get the Chantry on side too - everything’s up in the air for them right now with the Circle fucked, so they’ve taken an anti-mage stance to try and distract from any of it being their fault. Anora’s with us, but please don’t murder her father in front of her, for my sake. I know he’s a bastard, and we _can_ sentence him to death, but _please_ give my friend the common decency of a formal execution. Kings don’t make their own kills.”

Alistair nodded with a dry mouth, as the doors to the castle opened. Loghain’s staff all watched him warily as he entered the keep. They were brusquely led into an antechamber, and told to wait. 

Eamon clapped him on the back, with the kind of smile he’d often searched out in childhood, a mixture of pride and almost fatherly affection. “As the ones who called the meeting, we arrive last so everyone can complain about how inconvenient we're being and how long we made them wait,” his former guardian said, in a lame joke - though Ismene had already explained that to him. 

The last few days had been a lot of… explaining.

Honestly, part of him felt like he was cheating. This was all _Izzy’s_ work. She’d worked hard to get everyone on side with the Wardens, and with his claim as the rightful heir. She should be the one claiming the throne - she didn’t need _him_ , even if he was lucky enough for her to want him to be there with her at the time. Alistair felt like he’d been dressed up in a costume and pushed onto a opera stage, while his wife had designed and constructed the set, and written all the melodies and the script, and was perhaps even singing everything behind stage while he mouthed the words. He didn’t feel trapped, exactly, but he certainly felt like an understudy, or an imposter.

“Love,” came a voice to his right, and he saw Izzy standing there, with her stupidly perfect hair and concern plain on her perfect face. “It’ll be alright. We’ve got this, remember? Both of us. Together.”

“...You really think I’ll make a good king?”

“You can do anything you put your mind to,” she replied calmly, without a moment of hesitation. “You deserve this, Ali. You can do anything you want.”

“It’s really not that hard,” Anora said, off-hand, from where she was leaning against the wall in the corner. “Trust me, if Cailan can do it, so can you.”

 _But I don’t want to be like Cailan_.

The constant thrum of noises that had been their constant accompaniment since they were led to this room began to die down to a low hum of chatter, as the final delegates began to enter the hall and take their seats. The meeting would soon be called. Alistair felt like he was going to be sick.

“It’s almost time,” Eamon said. He peered through a crack in the door. “Loghain and his dog are there.”

“Ser Cauthrien is actually a very capable woman,” Anora snapped, folding her arms. She was beginning to look a little antsy, like perhaps she wasn’t quite as much at peace with killing her father as she thought. There was definitely a mounting tension in the room. Alistair swore he was sweating inside his armour.

“Well, then,” Izzy said, with a long sigh that quavered slightly at the end. She too looked a little pale around the edges, and kept adjusting her gauntlets as she often did when she was nervous. She looked over at him, and mustered a forced grin, “ready to begin our life sentence?”

 _Life sentence._ For a moment, he thought she meant that they were going to lose to Loghain. But then he realised she was simply referring to their time on the throne. 

He didn’t know why it surprised him - he’d known how she felt becoming Queen was a duty and a necessity, not something she actually wanted. 

But… he didn’t want her to think of their marriage as a prison. Even if her reason had absolutely nothing to do with him, as he’d originally thought.

She was doing all of this for him. Did he even... _want_ to be King? It wasn’t his idea. It was just what everyone else had wanted for him. But… what he wanted…

...He’d already gotten it.

The hall beyond their chamber now held an anticipatory hush, that was somehow a silent cue for them to begin. Ismene took one step towards the door. Anora readjusted her posture, bringing up her defences in a way he’d seen Izzy do a hundred times since coming to Denerim. There was dread deep in his gut.

“Wait!” Alistair said.

Eamon, Anora, and Iz all halted their progress towards the door, and turned to look at him, surprised.

“Why don’t we just put Anora back on the throne?” he said, aware that this was quite the decision to be making thirty seconds before they planned to take the court.

Ismene’s face fell a little, and she immediately looked pitying, “Alistair, love, I’m sure you’ll-”

“No,” he said, and was surprised by how forceful his voice was, filled with a confidence he rarely possessed. “I’m not being a coward, I’m serious. I might be qualified to rule the Wardens, but not a country." He gestured to Anora, "she is. She has already been doing it for years! Why don’t we just make _her_ Queen?”

Eamon looked confused, the threads of his own plan slipping from his grasp.

Izzy sighed. “I’m not going to lie, love, I already thought of this, but-”

“-I’m not getting married again,” Anora said firmly - on this, at least, she seemed decided. “And I don’t have an heir. The Banns wouldn’t-”

“Just say I’ll be your heir,” Alistair interrupted with a shrug.

“I - what?”

“Having an heir is only a problem if there’s no clear line of succession, isn’t it?” he asked, half-convinced he was probably wrong and looking among them all for their confirmation. “But… I’m here. So that’s all... pretty clear. You don’t need to pop out any children… er. No offense.”

Anora took a breath. Paused for a second. Frowned, as if considering. “...But with all the work we’ve been doing, people are going to want _you_ on the throne, not me.”

“I’ll just - I’ll just say that the Wardens and the Blight are more of a priority,” Alistair said, picking up momentum as his plan became more certian. “It’s not just about the imminent threat of the archdemon - all the Fereldan Wardens are gone. We need to rebuild our troops for future blights. That’s going to take decades. Wars often take priority, don’t they? Particularly ones that could affect all of Thedas. You don’t see people judging Cailan for going off and… well… dying at Ostagar...”

Izzy was watching him, looking a little stunned.

“But…” Anora narrowed her eyes, “endorsing your claim to Marric’s bloodline, even a little, will always carry the threat of civil war. People will only accept a queen when they have no other option.”

“Not _quite_ true, Goldie,” Ismene pointed out. “I mean, tell that to Empress Celene. She’s got Gaspard well in hand.”

“There’s not going to be a civil war unless I actually want to rule Ferelden - which I don’t. And I’m going to be dead by forty anyway,” Alistair added. “So it’s not like I’ll be a threat for long.”

“Alistair,” Eamon said, in the voice he’d used a lot when Alistair was young. “I know you’re nervous, but think of all this work we’ve put in! We’ve earned the support of over half the court, and I’m absolutely certain we’ll put it to good use with you as King -”

“That’s an awfully generous use of the term ‘we’,” Alistair interrupted, and he thought that everyone in the room was surprised to see him talk over the Arl. “Izzy and Anora have been doing most of the work, I’ve just been sitting there looking pretty, and occasionally nodding along with nobles when they talk about ‘the hunt’, whatever that is. If I took the throne, Iz would be doing most of the work, and she doesn’t want to do it. _I_ don’t want her to do it. We should just give it all to Anora, who not only knows what she’s doing, but actually wants to do it.” He looked over at his sister-in-law, “I’m assuming you _do_ want to do it?”

Anora gave him a look, and he swore it was the first time she’d ever taken him seriously as a person, not merely a piece of furniture that Ismene's lips were occasionally attached to. 

“Um, yes, actually,” she said, primly. “If we’re being frank.”

“Then that’s all sorted, then, isn’t it?” Alistair looked around the room, waiting to hear objections. When he didn’t, he clapped his hands together. “Wonderful! Anora for Queen! Long may she reign, and all that!”

“...Did you …are you in your right mind?” Anora said, looking genuinely curious.

Izzy darted forward, placing a hand on his arm. “Ali, if you’re… if you’re doing this for me, you really don’t have to...”

“Yes, I do,” he told her, firmly. “You just told me I can do whatever I want. And what I _want_ is to live with my beautiful, happy wife until the end of my days, without politics getting in the way and making us both miserable.”

“I... oh.” Ismene looked a little dazed, “you’d - um - still want to be married? Even if it’s not for the sake of your claim?”

“Well, it’s hardly like we can annul the marriage,” Alistair joked, though his heart was pounding inside his chest at the declaration. “We’ve consummated it, now, and everything.”

Behind Ismene, Eamon put his head in his hands. Alistair chose to ignore him.

“I love you,” he told Izzy, taking her armoured hand and putting it over the centre of his breastplate, directly over his heart. “I want to be married to you, but I couldn’t stand to see you trapped in a life you hate. And I don’t even _want_ to be king.”

“Could’ve said _that_ a little earlier,” Anora muttered, though she was now starting to look quite pleased, and a lot more willing to overthrow her father.

“We’re Grey Wardens,” Ali told Ismene. It was a much nicer moment if he just ignored _everyone else_ in the room. “We’ve always been Grey Wardens. Not royalty. Think how sad you’d be, if you couldn’t decapitate things on a daily basis!”

Ismene bit into her lip, looking a little lost and uncertain. But it wasn’t a disappointed uncertainty, but a hopeful one. Like she almost didn’t dare wish for what he was offering to be true. He could’ve had her looking at him like that from the very beginning - what an absolute fool he’d been.

“I love you,” she said, “and I… and I love the Wardens too. I’ve never felt like I had any purpose, before the Joining. Not like I do now. I didn’t... I don’t want to leave.”

“Then we won’t,” he told her, simply, and pressed a kiss to her forehead, to seal the bargain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heehee, we're almost at the end! I hope you enjoyed it.
> 
> I've never enjoyed hardening Alistair because I've never actually made him King. He and my Warden always stay that way, as Grey Wardens. So I wanted to do a story where his hardening was about him deciding what he actually wanted and not feeling bad about it - I hope people like that as a conclusion. (It also features him coming into his own as the OG Emotional Support Himbo, so you should!)
> 
> One more chapter to go xx


	10. Chapter Ten

_Nine months later._

The bed was soft, clean, and comfortable. And that meant nothing to Ismene Cousland-Theirin’s subconscious mind, which would always lead her back to somehow being sprawled on top of her husband, as she had been for every morning of their marriage so far. The only time she hadn’t covered him like a blanket was when her injuries sustained from a very ill advised one-on-one with an archdemon prevented her from doing so. And on those nights, as she lay on her back and stared up at the ceiling, unable to quite believe she was still alive, Alistair had curled up against her side, his arms encasing her and anchoring her down during the nightmares.

When she felt so safe and so deliciously warm, it was always a slow, ponderous process to rouse to full consciousness. At the sound of birdsong, she peeled open her eyelids to spot a fresh patch of drool on Alistair’s collar. She wiped her mouth with only the barest twinge of shame, and when she glanced up at his face, she saw that he was already awake. He’d been watching her sleep again. Not that he really had much choice in that. Given the way she always pinned him down, his only options if he wanted to get out of bed were to either wake her up or wait until she got there herself. He nearly always picked the latter.

“Good morning, Warden-Commander,” he murmured, brushing a snagged strand of hair out of her face.

“Good morning, Warden-Commander,” she mumbled drowsily back, leaning down and pressing a kiss to the hollow of his throat that made his body jump a little beneath her. When they'd restarted the Fereldan Grey Wardens, they’d felt like they were completely within their rights to create a co-chaired position . They’d both been leading the Ferelden faction for over two years at that point - they were perfectly and equally qualified.

She leveraged herself up into all fours on top of him, head flopping with a groan as aching muscles protested. “Andraste’s flaming tits,” she grunted, as she rolled off and out of the bed in just her button-down, cold air brushing over her bare legs. Her inelegant dismount woke Lady Imelda from where she’d been sleeping on a blanket at the foot of the bed.

“Why are you so sore? We didn’t even…” Ali trailed off suggestively, with an obnoxious waggle of his eyebrows.

Izzy rolled her eyes at him. “You can keep making sex jokes if you want, but it was Sigrun who did this to me, so that rather backfires on you, don’t you think?” She found a pair of discarded breeches puddled on the floor. They’d lasted two days, they could last another - she started yanking them on. “I thought fighting Zevran was bad. Try someone half his size, twice as fast, who’s been taking tea with darkspawn and already attended her own fucking funeral.”

“I still think Velanna is the scariest. She makes Morrigan look chipper,” Alistair sighed, before getting out of bed as well.

“And somehow fully clothed,” Iz added with a smirk.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alistair lied valiantly. He leant down and kissed her, with a mouth still sour from sleep. “I never even noticed.”

“Mmmhmm?” she replied, unconvinced, and kissed him again for good measure. 

Then they left the castle and walked out to the Amaranthine shore, to let Lady Imelda sprint down the beach at full pelt while the waves roared and spray battered their face, come sun or rain.

And so began another day, ruling the Grey Wardens out of Amaranthine. Ismene would’ve paid good money to see Leonie and her mother Bann Esmerelle’s faces when they were informed by the newly re-crowned Queen Anora that all their lands were ceded to the Wardens. But unfortunately she’d been absent on her honeymoon at the time - or rather, a three week long vacation getting drunk with her friends, as they saw Leliana and Zevran off to the port in Jader - which meant she'd only been able to deal with the messy aftermath. 

When she’d found out that, despite reneging their claim to the throne, her best friend had still deliberately landed her with a castle and all its wonderful admin, Izzy had laughed at _how much of a bitch Anora really was_.

But there were worse things to do, she supposed, than to sit opposite Alistair on a desk, eating breakfast one-handedly and sorting through their paperwork. In amongst all their correspondences, detailing the scars left on the land by the Fifth Blight, a few bright spots: a letter from Zevran gloating over the quality of this year’s Antivan summer; a message from Wynne informing her of conditions in the Circle, with a few hints towards improvements that Ismene guessed she not-so-subtly wanted passed on to the Royal Council; an update from Anora on the five proposals she’d spurned this month, and the blonde Orlesian actor she’d taken as a lover to fill in her spare time. 

A letter from Fergus Cousland, new Teyrn of Highever, informing her on how the restoration of their family home was going. They’d not really been that close before. But they’d both lost so much in the last two years, and so Ismene kept up a consistent correspondence, to monitor how her brother was coping with the grief of losing not only his family, but a child, and a wife who he might not have loved, but had cared about a lot as a companion and best friend. 

As a postscript, he'd included a new verse that the local Highever bard had added to her version of ‘The Fortress Besieged’. _It’s not every day one is forced to listen to the deflowering of his sister in detail,_ Fergus wrote, _but I found the forced rhymes with ‘knickers’ particularly charming._

“The Chasind should’ve smothered him in his sleep,” she muttered, but she found that she couldn’t stop smiling. 

That was a recurrent problem for Ismene this year: happiness. She didn’t know what to do with it. Yes, she was dealing with a worrying bout of sentience in the darkspawn community, but that was the sort of problem she… dare she say it?... _enjoyed_ trying to fix. She woke up every morning, and she faced a day filled with purpose. She fought constantly, every day, and yet it was somehow effortless compared to the struggle of trying to fit herself into the tidy neat confines of the noblewoman’s life she’d had before.

Love, too. That was something she’d once felt she had to guard against, something she’d reserved for delivering lukewarm to her father, and to Anora. Now her heart was so full of it, she worried it was making her soft even as it gave her newfound ferocity. She saw Nathanial Howe watching her during their training sessions with the other recruits, looking for weaknesses, and no doubt the remnants of the angry, vengeful monster who’d killed his father. Possibly he was even searching for the girl who’d gotten him drunk and laid, while cowering in a corner, sipping ale, and desperately trying to take in what little she could of the world. He couldn't seem to find either in the woman presented to him now. Often, she’d say something off-hand to Anders, some corny or filthy joke that the mage seemed to encourage her to come up with, and Nathanial would do a double take, like he was seeing a stranger who wore a familiar looking face.

Izzy kept trying to be serious and intimidating - if only to have some hope of controlling her new ragtag bunch of Wardens - but then Alistair would also tell her joke to make her laugh, and the veneer would shatter.

It was not just her love for Alistair, either, that was undermining parts of her personality that she had once thought fixed. That was a fresh wave she crested every morning, sometimes climbing to heights she thought she wasn't really capable of. But the rest of her heart was still filled with affection: for her friends, now flung afield across the continent; for Morrigan, hiding somewhere in the wilderness; and even for the people who followed them and trusted them, who loved them in return for the heroic ideal they imagined them to be. 

These days, when Ismene said something, people _listened_. Autonomy and power - she’d been given it, after all those years of dreaming , and she actually knew what to do with it as well. She held a position as an advisor on Anora’s council - “the Grey Wardens don’t mess in politics, Goldie!” “What utter bollocks, tell me again how King Bhelen is doing these days?” - and was even allotted a portion of Cailan’s once precious military budget for rebuilding the Warden forces. And what was more... no one questioned it. Ismene and Alistair were both the smallest Warden chapter, and the only one in living memory to defeat an archdemon: no one saw her in armour and reacted scornfully. All she faced now, from the men she’d once feared and resented, was deep, deep respect (and, she had to admit, a healthy dose of fear, particularly if they were one of her former suitors).

She loved it. She was… _happy_.

“What’s that face for?” Alistair asked her from across the table. When she blinked and came back to the room, he already had a conspiratorial smile on his face, like they’d shared the secret before she’d even replied.

“Oh, you know,” she grinned. “Just thinking about menacing people with my sword.”

“Aww, and it’s not even noon!”

Izzy got out of her chair and stretched her arms up above her head, languidly. When Alistair’s eyes dropped pointedly to the band of pale skin under her shirt hem that was exposed as she did so, it was not lost on her, and so she let the stretch last a few seconds longer than needed. His eyes remained pinned to her, as she walked around the table to stand next to him, a head taller than him in respective height, and looked down at his beautiful face. She placed a hand on each of his cheeks, tilting him away from his papers to face her. On her left hand, the silver wedding band glinted.

“I love you, husband,” she told him, very seriously.

“I love you too, my scary, stabby wife,” he replied. 

And then she kissed him, and what followed after meant that all their paperwork ended up falling off the table, and scattering across the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There you go, everyone. Thank you for reading _The Fortress of Highever_ , which was my attempt at a soft little fluffy story that inevitably ended up in angsty territory because I'm me!!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed reading it!! If you did, maybe drop some kudos or a comment, to feed my ego, and motivation for future projects!! I really appreciate any and all feedback I get, particularly when serotonin is so hard to get ahold of in this economy.
> 
> I have two other fics, one complete Origins piece and one behemoth of an Inquistion fic, so if you feel like reading more from me I've got plenty of words to spare. I also have a dragon age tumblr [here](https://ashatarsylnin.tumblr.com/), and a ko-fi account [here](https://ko-fi.com/howlsmovinglibrary), if that's a thing that matters to people.
> 
> Speak to you soon :D xxx


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